Ninh Binh Province in Vietnam achieves sustainable development in the durian industry.
For a long time, acting as a bridge to assist farmers in planting and promoting product sales, the Dak Lak Durian Association has continuously proposed multiple solutions and suggestions, ensuring a clear direction for the development of the durian industry and making the most thorough preparations for the export of this fruit.
Facing numerous challenges
Currently, the durian planting area in Dak Lak province is approximately 41,000 hectares (including 1,000 hectares from the former Phu An province), with an estimated production of about 400,000 tons by 2025. The industry is currently facing numerous challenges, especially the increasingly stringent requirements of the import market in terms of plant quarantine standards, coding of planting areas and packaging factories, high-standard planting techniques, product traceability, and quality control. Therefore, growers and enterprises urgently need practical and timely support.
Dak Lak Durian Association President Le Anh Trung stated that, based on the overall situation of this year's durian season, farmers are facing three major difficulties. First, Dak Lak durian has had another bountiful harvest with improved fruit quality, but the opening season price is low, causing great concern among growers. Many farmers have invested a lot of costs, but due to poor sales and falling prices, planting activities have fallen into a dilemma.
Second, some planting areas have not yet been coded, or they face difficulties in maintaining standardized planting processes according to export standards. This issue has not been effectively resolved over the years.
Third, some areas still have internal competition and price suppression by buyers. Farmers lack timely updates on the export market and have limited production cooperation with backbone enterprises, which affects their sales assurance capabilities.
The Dak Lak Durian Association pointed out that the root causes of these three major problems lie in the lack of a unified coordination mechanism, which cannot promptly resolve issues from planting to export. To break the deadlock, the Dak Lak Durian Association is continuing to play its role as a bridge between farmers, enterprises, and national management agencies, actively promoting related work.
In the short term, during the current durian harvest season, the Durian Association is recommending that relevant departments strengthen inspection and supervision of durian procurement, packaging, and export links to ensure strict compliance with the provisions of the agreement signed with China. This will accelerate the coding process for planting areas and packaging factories.
In the long term, the Durian Association will focus on supporting members to organize production according to standardized processes, actively connecting with reputable export enterprises, and assisting farmers in improving their ability to obtain market information. This will establish a sustainable interaction chain between growers, enterprises, and the market. Only in this way can the current difficulties faced by farmers be fundamentally resolved.
Just before the durian harvest season this year, the Dak Lak Durian Association, in collaboration with the German International Cooperation Agency (GIZ), held three capacity-building training sessions, providing professional training for 500 farmers, cooperative leaders, and representatives of durian export enterprises in the province.
Through the training courses, farmers, cooperative leaders, and enterprise representatives, under the guidance of experts, mastered the following contents: sustainable durian planting techniques, application of Good Agricultural Practices (VietGAP), safe use of pesticides, relevant regulations of the import market, use of electronic planting logs in combination with product traceability, formulation of procurement docking plans between export enterprises and growers, etc. Additionally, experts also guided the trainees on how to collect soil and leaf samples.