The increasing demand for quality foodstuff in Vietnam has lured interest from US exporters who are now hoping to boost sales of their agricultural products, particularly wine and beef, said agricultural attaché John Wade from US Department of Agriculture.
“American products that are already selling best in Vietnam include cotton, wood, leather, wheat and grains, and a lot of things are for the export industry in Vietnam,” Wade said.
“We would like to bring products that we do very well, such as meat and wine, to the Vietnamese market. We have a lot of land and that is the primary condition to produce wine, cotton, beef, pork, chicken and grains at low costs,” Wade said, adding that the US will sell more of these products to Vietnam and will continue buying Vietnamese coffee, cashew and rubber.
Wade also expressed his confidence that the sale of these products on the Vietnamese market would increase in future in accordance with the enhanced living standard of the Vietnamese people.
“I think the people’s prosperity is increasing every year in Vietnam. They will be ready to pay for US high quality beef and wine,” he said.
“Vietnamese people will find American meat a better quality than what they can produce here, particularly beef. We have land and high technology and we do not have environment problems. So there are some advantages in America that we hope the Vietnamese people can take advantages of for their own benefit.”
The agricultural attaché meanwhile, stressed that the unfamiliarity of Vietnamese consumers to the US meat and wine and high import tariffs were the main challenges for the access of those products in Vietnam’s market in the near future.
“One of the biggest difficulties is making Vietnamese people aware of what we have to offer. In order to succeed, the US embassy will cooperate with US entrepreneurs in Vietnam to organize more events to showcase our products. We just want the Vietnamese people try our wine and meat and realize that we have delicious food at good prices, too,” Wade said.
Under the US-Vietnam bilateral market access agreement signed in late May, in return for the US’s support to Vietnam’s WTO membership, Vietnam will cut tariffs on more than three-quarters of US agricultural exports to Vietnam from the current 27 per cent to 15 per cent or less.
The US exporters, however, hope the Vietnamese government will cut more tariffs levied on their meat products exports to Vietnam.
“Tariffs will go down after Vietnam joins the WTO but not as much as we would like, particularly for wine and for meat,” Wade said. “I hope that we can work with the Vietnamese government to lower these tariffs. We know that tariffs on Vietnamese products to the US are generally very low, so we would like to see tariffs on our products lower,”
“Vietnam is still a developing country, so many kinds of the products that you need may not be the kinds of products that the US can offer, such as wine and beef. I think in the long term we can benefit and I hope exports of American agricultural products to Vietnam will grow more quickly.”
According to the Ministry of Trade's provisional statistics, Vietnam imported US$1 million worth of US beef last year, which was nearly double the amount of 2003 when the mad cow disease scare hit the country.
Vietnam Investment Review
Vietnamese
