Tea sector coordinating committee taking shape

(VOV) - The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) should establish a coordinating committee to provide effective oversight of sustainable development for the tea sector.

Representatives from Unilever Group of the UK and the Netherlands made the proposal at a conference in Hanoi on April 26, emphasizing that the active involvement of state management agencies and representatives from localities is of crucial significance to the overall success of developing the sector.

Addressing the event, Flovio Corsin, a representative from the Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH) said that the Vietnamese tea sector has not been restructured satisfactorily and it is ripe with defects.

The quality of tea products remains substandard and factories are experiencing an inordinately high level of production inefficiencies, Corsin said.

Additionally, tea growers have not fully coordinating their production activities and many are fully unaware of the benefits of producing tea sustainably and, most significantly, the need to use agricultural chemicals sparingly and responsibly, he continued.

Sharing the viewpoint, the MARD Cultivation Department Head Pham Dong Quang in turn said that the tea sector has revealed far too many shortcomings in scale, breeds, output and quality, leading to export products with low value.

At present, the price of Vietnamese export tea are at the lowest levels among the world’s ten leading tea exporters, Quang said.

For his part, MARD Minister Cao Duc Phat urged businesses to expand cooperation among relevant units in the sector by setting up a coordinating committee in the immediate future, tightening control over processing establishments and issuing regulations to punish violators.

Minister Phat emphasized that the overall objective of the committee is to reach a consensus on the strategy for development of the tea sector, focusing on providing farmers with technical guidelines to develop the tea sector sustainably and meet the standards of the international marketplace.

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