Thai Nguyen Province Develops Crops with High Economic Value

Not being the country’s largest tea plantation, but Thai Nguyen is known as the realm of tea. For a long time, tea trees have brought the land in lots of economic development potentials. The Thai tea has own charming taste and fragrance.    

Thai Nguyen tea products are also different from fragrance to sweet, harsh tastes, which belong to terrain and methods of picking and drying. Thai Nguyen-branded tea products such as Tan Cuong, Phuc Thuan, Quan Chu and Dai Tu have been familiar to Vietnamese consumers and exported to many foreign markets. In order to raise the economic value of tea trees – main crop of the province, Thai Nguyen has been deploying many measures to expand the province’s tea area to 18,500 hectares by 2015 with capacity of 12 tons per hectare. The annual tea output is expected to reach 200,000 tons of fresh tender tea leaves and the production value at VND85 million per hectare by that year.    

The province has planned material regions for processing at the percentage of 80 per cent for green tea and 20 per cent for black tea. For the specialty of green tea, the material region will concentrate on Thai Nguyen City, Song Cong River and districts of Dai Tu, Dong Hy and Phu Luong. The province aims to the expansion of plantation area in parallel with conversing tea varieties, replanting 4,000 hectares and reducing the area of Trung Du tea to 40 per cent-50 per cent of total area. This year, the provinces started rechecking equipment and technologies of processing plants, the capacity of providing materials of plantation regions. Accordingly, the province will grant operation license for processing establishments which prove the capacity, encourage small-scaled processing stations right in farms and call on growers to combine technologies with handiwork in order to produce traditional tea specialties. The provincial agriculture and rural development agency is required to join hands with the science and technology agency to build production models with the scale of 30-50 hectares which apply comprehensively technical solutions, advanced technologies in all steps from watering, putting down fertilizer to harvesting in order to have high-qualified and safe products. The province also plans to develop 100 per cent of tea plantation area in big production regions in accordance with the Vietnamese Good Agricultural Practices (VietGap).

 

In the period of 2011-2015, the province will particularly focus on invest and develop the Thai Nguyen tea brand, support producers to get access to and expand market, to attract more foreign investments into material regions and processing industries. Initially, the province will extract from its budget to promote three projects on planning tea regions, raising the quality and hygiene of products and developing the Thai Nguyen tea brand. The province will also offer policies to support infrastructures for safe tea regions, support interests and reduce a part of income taxes for processing enterprises, help to train human forces.     

At present, the province has over 17,600 hectares of tea. Of the total area, 35 per cent are new variety which has average output of 80 quintals per hectare and economic value of VND68 million per hectare per year. Over the past five years, Thai Nguyen has invested more than VND19 billion for the development of tea plantation. However, the program of developing and raising the economic value of tea trees in the province still faces shortcomings. For example, the area of new variety over the total remains low. The material plantations and processing establishments lack comprehensive contact. The construction of Thai Nguyen tea brand has not yet received adequate attention. In order to advertise the Thai Nguyen tea products to domestic and foreign consumers, an international tea festival is scheduled to be held in the tea land this November. It is expected that the event will bring a new breakthrough for the tea kingdom.