Agricultural Products Are Still Struggling To Find Market

“High volume, low price” situation and market for agricultural products are inherent difficulties of farmers and it tends to be worse.

Unhappy farmer sits next to his pile of unsold watermelons.

However, changing farmers ‘habit in agricultural production in the context of integration is still a challenges for themselves as well as local authorities.

As usual, when it comes to main harvest season, farmers growing watermelons in Gia Lai in particular and other provinces in general struggle to sell their products. While this situation hasn’t had solutions yet, recently thousands tons of watermelons in Gia Lai Province piles up.

Mr. Pham Van Lap (farmer in An Phu Ward, An Khe Distrist) said that due to favorable crop and weather, there are large amount of high quality watermelons but the price is just lower than 1000 dong/kg.

Therefore, farmers still concern about how to afford their living day by day. Actually, in the past period, many enterprises and traders actively tried to “save” agricultural products such as onion, watermelon, garlic…by buying these products with acceptable price and sell them to final customer with the best price. However, it is obviously not a long-term solution, farmers cannot rely on other’s “generosity”.

Besides, recently farmers in Mang Yang Commune (Gia Lai) cut down coffee to plant passion fruit, which is expected to generate high profit but this plant still hasn’t had a stable market. According to farmers, with coffee price of only 30,000 dong/kg, they will incur loss. Meanwhile, current passion fruit price is 6,000 dong/kg and it takes only 6 months to be ready for harvesting. Accordingly, planting passion fruit is 4 times as profitable as coffee.

Many economists said that switching to passion fruit spontaneously is risky because there hasn’t been a stable market for it yet. In order to reduce the risk, it is necessary to coordinate with processing industry. Local authorities has warned about these possible risk but farmers continue with their habit like it happened before with cocoa, rubber…

At the seminar, “Challenges and opportunities of agricultural sector after TPP” held in Gia Lai, Mr. Nguyen Duy Luong - Vice Chairman of Vietnam Farmers’ Union said if farmers keep on mass production and grow whatever they like without complying with any standards, farmers cannot add value to agricultural products and penetrate into big and high competitive market after TPP.

In order not to face this situation, it is critical to form new mindset for farmers. For instance, giving up spontaneous production. Besides, farmers should participate in agricultural cooperatives, farmers associations to equip high technology in production and obtain direct sales opportunities with distributors, ensuring market for their agricultural products.

Dung Nguyen

Source: Dan Viet