Last year’s total export turnover of agricultural products reached US$7.5 billion of which rice export turnover hit nearly US$1.3 billion, rubber (US$1.3 billion), coffee (US$80 million) and fruit and vegetables (US$260 million). Despite being one of Vietnam’s key export agricultural products, fruit and vegetable export turnover remains a pittance due to a low and unstable growth rate. The main cause is that the fruit and vegetable sector still lacks specific planning projects and concentrated cultivation areas, resulting in the failure to win big export contracts. While Thailand’s fruit and vegetable production scale is between 5-10 hectares per farmer household, Australia, 40-50 hectares per household, the figure in Vietnam stands at only 200-300 m2 for vegetable, 1,000 m2 for fruits per farmer household. Meanwhile, Vietnamese farmers fail to apply advanced technologies in the production to create high productivity and equal quality in order to meet the needs for high quality and hygiene safety of food required by foreign markets. 

To date, around 30 percent of districts throughout the country have no agricultural promotion centres and 19 percent of communes have no agricultural promotion staff, thus causing some difficulties for farmers to gain access to clean production.  The world’s agricultural product export markets have now been put under strict control by supermarket systems run by multilateral companies. Due to consumers’ increasing knowledge, supermarkets’ requirements for high-quality agricultural products have become stricter and caused barriers for many developing countries which consider exports of agricultural products an impetus to stimulate economic development. Joining the WTO provides opportunities but also poses challenges for the fruit and vegetable sector as it will have to renew production and processing technology and increase management capacity to produce high-quality products at lower costs.

According to Minister of Trade Tran Duc Minh, to boost fruit and vegetable exports to the WTO, the sector should resolve a number of major issues with a focus on securing sufficient and stable supplies of export goods, ensuring quality and food hygiene and safety as well as offering competitive prices and services.

Generally, farmers in the agricultural production sector as well as the fruit and vegetable sector still lack hands-on experience in applying advanced technology into production.

The Ministry of Trade will coordinate with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development to make a draft national programme on developing production and exporting fresh fruit and vegetables for submission to the Government. The programme will cost a total of nearly VND1 billion under which the State will support the building of pilot models and infrastructure facilities for producing fruit and vegetable and transfer the production and export process to farmers. The remainder will be contributed by localities and enterprises.

The programme is divided into the two phases, from 2006-2010 and 2010-2015 towards the target of reaching US$1 billion in export turnover. In the short term, a pilot production model for fruit and vegetable exports will be applied in Lao Cai, Yen Bai, Vinh Phuc, Hai Duong, Bac Giang, Lam Dong, Can Tho, Vinh Long, Binh Thuan and HCM City. These localities will develop farms in the form of limited liability companies which will play a role in coordinating activities with farmer households to create material areas for enterprises’ export manufacturing. Besides this, the State will support the establishment of three fruit and vegetable export trading centres in Lao Cai, Da Lat and HCM City. These centres will help enterprises preserve cold storages and conduct transaction activities as well as signing export contracts.

In 2006, rice and fruit vegetable growing areas accounted for 74 percent and 15 percent of the country’s total cultivated areas respectively. Meanwhile, the fruit and vegetable market is 10 times bigger than the rice market. It is a big question whether we continue to seek a large share of a “small cake” (rice) or a small share of a “big cake” (fruit and vegetables) on the agricultural product market of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The answer belongs to policy makers.