Enhancing the competitiveness of agricultural products.

(Baonghean) - During a recent visit to Nghe An, the former Chief Representative of JICA Japan in Vietnam provided information that surprised and impressed many: the price of 1 kg of high-quality oranges produced in Japan and sold in Vietnam is approximately 20,000 VND, regardless of whether it's in season or off-season; similarly, a bottle of processed orange juice from Japan sold in Vietnam is still not too expensive.

Japan is considered a demanding market, with relatively high incomes and living standards, limited land resources, but its advanced agricultural production technology has resulted in delicious, high-quality, and affordable products, making it highly competitive. However, in Vietnam, and Nghe An in particular, despite the great potential of land and cheap labor, the prices of agricultural products are too high compared to the current living standards and incomes of the people.

Currently, oranges of genetic origin from Xã Đoài (Nghi Lộc), V2 Phủ Quỳ (Nghĩa Đàn, Quỳ Hợp), Yên Khê (Con Cuông), etc., cost around 50-60 thousand VND/kg. Off-season oranges (harvested close to the Lunar New Year) fetch even higher prices, 80-90 thousand VND/kg, and some Xã Đoài oranges even reach 70 thousand VND/fruit, with some being unavailable at the orchard. Similarly, other key fruit varieties like Phúc Trạch pomelo (Hà Tĩnh) and Năm Roi pomelo (Southern Vietnam) cost 100-150 thousand VND per fruit. Clearly, these prices not only diminish the competitiveness of Vietnamese agricultural products globally but are also far too high compared to people's incomes. According to housewives, in previous years, preparing a five-fruit offering for Tet only cost a few hundred thousand dong, but now it has increased two to three times (around 700,000 to 1 million dong), which is too high.

Not only fruits and vegetables, but also some other food items such as duck eggs, chicken eggs, and livestock meat in our country are not cheap. Currently, eggs from purebred chickens and ducks that are not fed growth hormones are usually one and a half to two times more expensive than eggs from industrially raised chickens. On the other hand, because our chicken and duck eggs and some types of fish are too expensive, there was a time when eggs and fish imported from abroad at cheap prices were suspected by consumers to be fake or of poor quality (of course, there are cases of fake goods; but in reality, the cheap poultry eggs and fish exported from abroad are due to high productivity and low input costs).

From the above reality, it is evident that our agricultural products are difficult to sell and have low competitiveness partly due to excessively high prices, mainly caused by high input costs for production and small-scale, fragmented, low-productivity livestock farming. Industrial-scale shrimp and poultry farming is profitable, but the high feed costs put a lot of pressure on farmers, who always want to sell at high prices to recover their capital. This is often the case for small-scale farming and livestock facilities, but in large-scale agricultural production areas, after the basic design phase and relatively recovering their investment, instead of having a roadmap to reduce prices to increase competitiveness and encourage domestic market demand, producers only think about gradually increasing prices to increase profits rather than lowering them. This is most evident with oranges and pomelos; For example, in some orange-growing areas in our province, a few years ago when the area was small and the product was not widely known, the price was only 30,000 - 35,000 VND/kg. Now, with a larger scale, some areas earn billions of VND/hectare annually. Instead of decreasing, the price increases by 30-50% year after year, making it unaffordable for people to buy oranges.

In my opinion, to increase the competitiveness of our agricultural products, producers need to improve their capacity, save costs, and reduce input expenses. On the other hand, they must develop product consumption segments that match the actual income of the people; implement a price reduction roadmap to stimulate consumer demand; and avoid setting excessively high prices for profit, which would make it difficult for agricultural products to enter larger markets and fail to capitalize on domestic demand.

Phuong Ha