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When will Vietnam standardize coffee exports?
Vietnamese coffee producers apply different standards that are not applied throughout the world. As a result, Vietnamese coffee exporters suffer from a competitive disadvantage in the world market.
Numerous meetings and workshops discussing Vietnamese coffee standards on coffee export products have been organized over the last ten years. However, the problems still persist.
The Vietnam Coffee and Cocoa Association (Vicofa) has just organized one more workshop on the issue. The association once again called for the application of international standards for coffee exports.
There have been up to ten different coffee standards that the Ministries of Agriculture and Rural Development, Trade, and Science and Technology have respectively proposed.
According to experts, the Vietnamese method for classifying coffee, based on the percentage of ruined coffee beans, is not the method applied in the international market.
Many Vietnamese companies say they do not want to apply the TCVN 4193: 2005 standard, while foreign importers who purchase Vietnam’s coffee also do not want to apply this standard. Foreign importers regularly complain about the quality of Vietnam’s exports. As a result, the volume of refused products sometimes reaches 60 percent of Vietnam’s coffee exports, while export prices have been cut by $100-200 per ton, or even sometimes $600 per ton.
The volume of robusta coffee that receives a quality certification in London has been decreasing, while the inventory volume in London once reached a record high of 400,000 tons in late 2007 and early 2008.
Doan Trieu Nhan, a senior expert of Vicofa, said that Vietnam needs to standardize its coffee exports in order to give both buyers and sellers a guarantee on the origin and quality of products.
The standardization will also create favorable conditions for the state management agencies to prevent low quality coffee exports that do not meet the standards and negatively affect the prestige of the production country.
Bui Ba Bong, Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, has proposed certifying coffee products with UTZ, 4C, Global GAP, and VietGap certificates.
The perception is that Vietnamese coffee is low quality, so sale prices on the world market are always lower than coffee products provided from other countries, including Indonesia. Experts assert that this perception is based a misunderstanding, and that Vietnamese coffee is high quality compared to other coffee products throughout the world. However, problems persist in the harvesting, treatment, and classification techniques of growers.
Farmers are not financially capable of building cement yards to dry coffee, so sand sometimes gets mixed in with coffee beans. Also, farmers have a habit of picking unripe and ripe coffee beans at the same time. If they only picked ripe coffee beans, they would be able to receive higher prices for their products.
Nhan from Vicofa has proposed preparing for the implementation of the ISO 10470:2004 standard from September to November of this year. After that, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the relevant quality testing agencies will consider an application standard in December before issuing standards for coffee exports.
In fact, Vietnam has already accepted the ISO 10470:2004 standard and compiled the TCVN 7932: 2007 standard that was issued by the Ministry of Science and Technology in 2007. However, that standard has not been implemented.
Some big coffee producers have called for policies that encourage the export of high quality products, allowing only 10 percent of low quality products for export.
vietnamnet, TBKTVN
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