Workshop seeks to boost Vietnamese coffee sector

A workshop was held in the Central Highlands city of Da Lat on December 9 as part of the first Vietnam Coffee Day to discuss the current state of the Vietnamese coffee sector and the measures required to bolster the sector’s growth in the years ahead.

The workshop on Vietnam's coffee sector development
The workshop on Vietnam's coffee sector development

According to reports presented to the conference, Vietnam currently has 645,000 hectares of coffee, with the export volume reaching 1.79 million tonnes in 2016, bringing in US$3.3 billion, of which roasted and instant coffee accounted for slightly over 10%.

Vietnam is the world’s second largest coffee bean producer but faces a number of problems, including an increasing area of old coffee trees, a limited processing and storage capacity and a lack of cooperation between coffee growers and enterprises.

Furthermore, since a comprehensive strategy to boost exports has yet been formulated, the Vietnamese coffee sector has not succeeded in utilising its own advantages to improve its competitiveness on the global market.

Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Nguyen Xuan Cuong said that these issues will be discussed at the workshop so that Vietnam can increase its coffee export revenues to US$6 billion by 2030.

He stated that the approach would not include increasing the growing area but through raising the value by applying advanced techniques in all stages, from cultivation and tending to harvesting, processing and storage, as well as strengthening the farmer-enterprise relationship.