Increasing competitiveness of agricultural products

(Baonghean) - During a recent visit and work in Nghe An, the former Chief Representative of Japan's Jica in Vietnam provided information that surprised and admired many people, that is, the price of 1 kg of delicious oranges produced in Japan and sold in Vietnam is about 20,000 VND, regardless of main or off-season; similarly, a bottle of orange juice from Japan (processed) if sold in Vietnam is still not too expensive.

Japan is considered a demanding market, with high income and living standards, limited land fund, but with advanced agricultural production technology, it has produced delicious, quality and cheap products, so the competitiveness is very high. However, in Vietnam or Nghe An in particular, with great potential in land and cheap labor, the price of agricultural products is too expensive compared to the current life and income of people.

Each kilogram of oranges today, if they are genetically derived from Xa Doai (Nghi Loc) or V2 Phu Quy oranges (Nghia Dan, Quy Hop), Yen Khe oranges (Con Cuong)... have a common price of about 50 - 60 thousand VND/kg; if they are off-season oranges (harvested close to Lunar New Year), the price is even higher, 80 - 90 thousand VND/kg, even like Xa Doai oranges, which cost 70 thousand VND/fruit when bought in the garden but are not available to buy. Similarly, the price of some other strong fruit trees such as Phuc Trach grapefruit (Ha Tinh), Nam Roi (South) costs from 100 - 150 thousand VND/fruit... Obviously, with the above price, not only does the competitiveness of Vietnamese agricultural products in the world lose its advantage, but it is also too high compared to people's income. According to housewives, in previous years, to prepare a tray of five fruits for Tet, it only cost a few hundred thousand to three hundred thousand dong, but now it has increased by 2-3 times (about 700 thousand to 1 million dong), which is too high.

Not only fruit products but also some other foods such as duck eggs, chicken eggs, and livestock meat in our country are not cheap. Currently, if purebred chicken and duck eggs do not eat growth-promoting feed, they are usually one and a half to two times more expensive than industrial chicken eggs. On the other hand, because our chicken and duck eggs and some types of fish are too expensive, there is a time when eggs and fish are imported from abroad, cheap, so consumers suspect that they are fake eggs and fish or do not guarantee quality (of course there are also cases of fake goods; but in essence, the reason why foreign poultry eggs and fish are sold cheaply is because of high productivity and low input costs).

From the above reality, it can be seen that our agricultural products are difficult to sell and have low competitiveness partly because the price is too expensive, mainly due to the high input costs for production and small-scale, fragmented, low-yield livestock farming. Industrial shrimp and poultry farming is profitable, but the high cost of feed puts farmers under a lot of pressure and they always want to sell at high prices to recover capital. This is often the case for small livestock and crop farms, but there are large agricultural production areas after the basic design stage, with a relatively high recovery of investment capital. Instead of having a roadmap to reduce prices to increase competitiveness and encourage purchasing power in the domestic market, producers only think about gradually increasing prices to increase profits, not reducing prices. The most obvious are oranges and grapefruits; For example, a few years ago, when the area was still small and the product was not known to many people, the price was only 30,000 - 35,000 VND/kg. Now, the scale is larger, and some areas earn billions of VND/ha per year. Instead of decreasing, the price increases 30 - 50% year after year, making it so that people do not have enough money to eat even if they want to.

In my opinion, to increase the competitiveness of our agricultural products, on the one hand, producers need to have plans to improve capacity, save, and reduce input costs; on the other hand, we must build a product consumption segment suitable to people's actual income; have a roadmap to reduce prices to stimulate people's consumption of products; we should not, for profit, set prices too high, making it difficult for agricultural products to reach large markets and also not exploit the purchasing power of the domestic market.

Phuong Ha