Vietnamese tea exports are half the world's price.

Ranking 5th globally in export volume, Vietnamese tea's selling price is only 60% of the world average.

The Vietnam Industry and Trade Information Center (VITIC) has just reported on a number of exported goods in the first 7 months of this year. Regarding tea, the export volume reached 69,000 tons, up nearly 5% but the value decreased by more than 2% compared to the same period. The reason is that the export price of tea decreased by 6.6%, reaching only about 1,160 USD per ton.

Vietnam is the world's 5th largest tea exporter but the price is 60-70% lower than the average.

Vietnam's largest tea export market is Pakistan with 33.7% market share, down 11.1% in value due to a 9.8% price drop over the same period. Markets with strong export value growth are Indonesia (2.1 times), Malaysia (1.8 times), the Philippines (3.5 times) and China (1.3 times).

According to VITIC, Vietnam is the 5th largest tea exporter in the world (after Kenya, Sri Lanka, China, India), the main export products are black tea, green tea, oolong tea, jasmine tea, OTC black tea... However, compared to other countries in the region, Vietnamese tea has the lowest export price, only 60-70% of the world tea price, and the market is not stable.

The main reasons are believed to be due to food insecurity and poor tea quality, the use of pesticides for tea in many places is still quite arbitrary, not ensuring quarantine time... is still common in many tea growing areas.

The Plant Protection Department (Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development) said that according to the survey results, up to 49% of farmers in tea growing areas surveyed used pesticides at concentrations higher than the instructions, 64% of farmers used a mixture of 2 types of pesticides when spraying and 14% of farmers mixed 3 types of pesticides when spraying while they did not know that this mixing would increase the pesticide concentration many times.

Nearly 50% of farmers spray more than 7 times per crop, causing waste in pesticide use, environmental pollution, greatly affecting natural enemies and causing food safety problems for tea products.

Along with the situation of using drugs indiscriminately, with concentrations higher than prescribed, using drugs not on the list of drugs allowed for use on tea is the main reason for the high level of drug residue on tea products today. This is the reason why many shipments of Vietnamese tea exports have been warned or returned by partners. Recently, many export shipments amounting to tons have been returned due to the content of impurities and substances that do not meet standards.

Many tea processing facilities do not have raw material areas, often do not pay attention to strictly controlling the quality of input materials, especially controlling pesticide residues on tea, and unreasonable purchasing prices, thus discouraging producers from paying attention to the quality of raw materials. The situation of collecting raw materials through many intermediaries not only increases the price but also prolongs the storage time, reducing the quality of raw materials.

VITIC believes that, to develop sustainable tea, the State and enterprises need to pay attention to science and technology. Tea processing facilities must create stable and long-term raw material areas. In particular, enterprises must organize their own centralized plant protection services to replace the use of plant protection by contracted households and tea growing households in the hope of controlling plant protection, residues of toxic active ingredients in drugs on products, ensuring food safety and improving productivity and quality of tea.

At the same time, tea production and processing must be associated with safe tea production planning in accordance with the safe tea production planning orientation of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.

According to Bach Duong/vne