Addressing the event, MARD’s Deputy Minister Ha Cong Tuan said that later last year, Vietnam had more than 643,000 hectares of coffee, of which over 576,000 hectares were in the Central Highlands’ provinces.
In the 2015-2016 crop, coffee productivity reached 2,430 tons per hectare while the total production was 1,459 million tons.
At present, Vietnam is ranked 2nd in the world in coffee production and export, and is the world’s No.1 in producing and exporting Robusta coffee.
Last year, Vietnam exported 1.79 millions of tons of coffee, earning more than USD 3.3 billion.
Development of the coffee industry has helped generate jobs for millions of laborers and importantly improve the living standards of locals, especially those in remote and mountainous areas and from minority ethnic groups in the Central Highlands.
Although it enjoyed a high growth, the coffee industry has experienced unstable and unsustainable development and faced implicit risks of consequences of climate change, unstable consumer markets, limited quality of coffee, high production costs, environmental issues resulting from coffee production, low competitiveness, and an unconnected chain of production, purchase, processing, storage and sales.
Moreover, the area of old and stunted coffee trees has been increasingly expanded while the planting of new coffee trees has met with difficulties in organization, techniques and capital. That has badly affected local efforts to raise added values for Vietnamese coffee and sustainable development of the Vietnamese coffee industry.
At the conference, managers, researchers, scientists, credit organizations, and enterprises voiced the facts of the Vietnam coffee industry and solutions to developing the industry to adapt to climate change and international integration.
MARD’s Deputy Minister Ha Cong Tuan hoped that via this conference, farmers, coffee processing and producing enterprises, units, sectors and managers would become more aware of sustainably developing the industry despite climate change.
Tuan emphasized that opinions of the participants are valuable to help the agricultural sector and policy-makers to issue more suitable policies with the aim of promoting sustainable development of the Vietnamese coffee industry.
The conference also served as a venue for enterprises to meet with, exchange and seek cooperation opportunities to expand the coffee consumer market in the context that Vietnam has been integrating intensively in the world.
Translated by Mai Huong