Tea sector to focus on quality

Viet Nam’s tea sector was intent on improving its product’s quality, hygiene and safety instead of focusing on productivity, an official of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development said yesterday.

The sector would also combine modern and traditional processing technologies to produce speciality teas of high quality, said the ministry’s Le Xuan, director of the Agro-forestry and Fishery Processing and Salt Industry Department.

He told an international tea conference in Ha Noi that Viet Nam’s tea sector needed to change and it would change, despite the challenges. It would strengthen its instruction and guidelines in terms of techniques and technologies and impose stricter controls, he said.

New tea varieties with higher productivity would be planted and there would be a focus on developing organic tea and increasing the country’s tea specialities to improve the sector’s performance.

Chairman of the Viet Nam Tea Association Doan Anh Tuan said the association would focus on expanding cultivation areas, as the plantations harvestednow were well below the processing capacity.

In fact the association would suggest localities cease issuing licences to new tea factories until the production situation in existing factories had been assessed. Those factories which failed to meet production requirements would be ordered to reach required levels or be closed down.

Viet Nam ranks fifth in the world and first in ASEAN in tea production.

Last year Viet Nam exported 130,000 tonnes of tea. In the first seven months of this year, it exported 65,000 tonnes.

The sector in Viet Nam employed 6 million people and contributed greatly to poverty reduction and socio-economic stability, Tuan said.

Farmers who grow tea can earn about VND19.5 million (US$1,000) per hectare.

The problem was, however, that the quality and productivity were not even. In some cases farmers harvested 6 tonnes per hectare, in others only 1-2 tonnes per hectare.

Moreover, 99 per cent of export tea was raw material and there was no world trademark for Vietnamese tea.

The country had about 445 tea enterprises, but many had not invested enough in machinery and assembly lines, Tuan said. The quality was not high and thus the price was lower.

And the country still did not have a plan for developing the tea sector so consequently everything was out of kilter. Processing capacity was twice that of the supply.

Tuan also said there was a lack of co-operation among farmers, enterprises and the Government, which lead to difficulties in promoting tea consumption and export.

At the conference, Muhammad Hanif Janno, Pakistani Tea Association chairman, said the Pakistani association was willing to co-operate with Viet Nam to improve its tea quality.

He said Viet Nam needed to make quality control top priority, control the use of pesticides and apply international criteria in all phases of tea production.

Viet Nam should open a bidding centre for tea, which would ensure quality and pricing for consumers, he added.

Nguyen Duy Hung, chairman of Phu Tho Province’s Tea Association, said the Government should install enforceable levels of hygiene and safety and encourage the expansion of the tea factory-tea plantation model.

Representatives of 20 countries attended the conference, including Malaysia, Pakistan, India and the United Kingdom. — VNS

Tags: Vietnam tea, Vietnam tea sector