US cashew buyers have recently warned Vietnamese exporters to pay more attention to the quality of nuts if they hope to fully tap the giant market.
At a meeting in the US organized by the Association of Food Industries earlier this month, executives from American food processing companies told Vietnamese cashew enterprises that nuts imported from Vietnam were of uneven quality.
As a result, some importers had turned to India, they said.
The US is by far Vietnam’s largest cashew market, buying 33 per cent of its total exports, followed by China, the Netherlands, and Australia.
An executive from Kraft Foods, the US’s largest branded food and beverages company, said some batches of nuts from Vietnam had pieces of metal, grit, and hair.
Though Kraft admitted that the rate of impurities in Vietnamese nuts was lower than that in other countries’, it warned this would nevertheless affect the country’s cashew exports.
Kraft imports more than 1,000 containers of cashew nuts every year.
Other importers also told Vietnamese processors to keep close watch on the quality of raw cashew and processing methods, saying different lots of nuts imported from the country had different colors and tastes.
Cashew shipments in the first nine months had fetched some US$400 million, a year-on-year fall of 1.5 percent despite higher volumes, the Vietnam Cashew Association said.
Vietnam, the world’s second largest exporter of cashew nuts after India, has suffered this year not only from falling export prices but also rising input costs. The industry is estimated to bear a total loss of VND3 trillion ($118 million) in 2006.
Moreover, local enterprises will have to pay a new value-added tax of 10 per cent this year compared to 5 per cent previously.
ThanhnienNews, Vietnam & World Economy
Vietnamese
