Vietnam Focus on Promoting Farm Produce Competitiveness

Vietnam Focus on Promoting Farm Produce Competitiveness

Vietnam is making greater efforts in building brands, registering trademarks, raising quality and diversifying models of its agricultural products especially staple exports such as rice, coffee, tea, vegetables and fruits to raise their competitive edge in foreign markets.

"Local enterprises should be more proactive in building brands and registering their trade marks for their farm produces," said Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Cao Duc Phat.

The minister said that due to a dearth of well-known brands, export prices of many Vietnamese agricultural products, including rice, tea and coffee are much lower than those of their foreign counterpart. A ton of Vietnamese rice is USUS$40 cheaper than Thai product, while local tea is priced 40 per cent less than tea exported by Sri Lanka.

Recently, the government has approved the Trade Ministry's program on building tea trademarks in the 2004-2005 period with total investment of VND27.5 billion (USUS$1.7 million). The Vietnam Tea Corporation, the country's biggest tea producer and exporter, has planned to promote some tea trademarks with a total investment of USUS$5 million in advertisement and build a tea trading floor in Hanoi to facilitate tea export.

To help local enterprises in building trademarks, the Trung Nguyen Coffee Company and the Saigon Economic Times Group have established a club of building trademarks for agricultural produces. The club has organized conferences, and offered consultations to enterprises on building and promoting their trademarks, and organized assistance projects on building trademarks for some enterprises. It has coordinated with the Vietnam Fruits Association in building and developing 30 trademarks for key products.

Together with building trademarks, local farmers and producers are intensifying the application of advanced technology in cultivation, processing and preserving, in order to ensure products' quality in all circles from production to sale, the use of new strains and diversification of product models.

The country for example, is using new rice varieties with high quality, which meet the changing tastes of importers and establishing a specialized zone in the Mekong delta for growing first-class rice with annual output of one million tons.

For coffee and tea, Vietnam has urged its enterprises to pay greater attention to hygienic and packaging factors to meet stricter requirements on hygiene, preservation and styles of importers, especially the EU, the US and China, which are biggest buyers of the local products. It has also asked them to ship abroad more processed products, as the country now exports mainly raw and unprocessed ones.

Like coffee and tea, the country has boosted export of safe fruits and vegetables whose growers use no or little chemicals during their cultivation and preservation.

Meanwhile, Vietnam is paying more attention to cutting production costs. Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Bui Ba Bong has urged the agricultural sector to apply more advanced technology and make full use of financial and technological assistance from the local governments and foreign agencies to reduce production costs.

The deputy minister noted that prices of local vegetables, meat, dairy products, soybeans and maize are higher than those from other countries, posing problems for Vietnam's international integration. Vietnam has hopes to export USUS$4.5 billion worth of agricultural and forestry products in 2005, a year-on-year increase of 4.7 per cent. It shipped abroad agricultural and forestry products worth of USUS$4.3 billion last year, an increase of 31 per cent over the 2003 figure.

• Vietnam Agriculture