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Vietnam is a country of repute in exporting coffee, with nearly 1 million tonnes of robusta beans a year. This volume is nearly double Indonesia’s, the world’s second-largest producer of robusta coffee.

In this position, any impact on Vietnam’s coffee will partly impact the world robusta coffee market.

Though farmers’ investments in coffee have remarkably increased in recent years, they still earn around VND15,000 (less than $1) per one kilo of coffee beans.

An expert with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development’s Office in HCM City said that with its production costs and huge output of robusta beans, Vietnam has nearly no rival in the global market.

“If there is competition, it’s competition among Vietnamese coffee exporters,” the expert said, adding that the weakness of Vietnam’s coffee is processing technology, quality and sales through intermediaries.

Moreover, before and since Vietnam joined the World Trade Organisation, no country has applied a quota or tax barrier on Vietnamese coffee.

It is the same for pepper. Exporting around 100,000 tonnes a year, Vietnam accounts for 50% of the world’s market. The country also ranks third worldwide in cashew exports.

The director of a cocoa company in the south said Vietnamese cocoa nearly doesn’t register in the international market so it is unnecessary to evaluate how it has been influenced by WTO accession.

He said Vietnam may export more cocoa in the next few years but at that time, cocoa growers will not be influenced much because cocoa is being planted as a secondary tree in coconut and coffee gardens so the production cost is very low.

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Nearly two years after Vietnam joined the WTO, foreign chicken is flooding the local market thanks to differences in consumption habits. In western countries, chicken legs and wings are not favoured so the price of these products is low. But in Vietnam, people prefer chicken legs and wings rather than other chicken parts.

Imported chicken last year accounted for 3-5% of the HCM City market, the largest market for chicken and the proportion may be 20-30%, experts said. Most restaurants and kitchens of factories are using imported chicken.

Imported pork and beef doesn’t greatly impact the domestic market but this product is favoured at big restaurants and hotels. As the price for pork rose in recent months, Thai pork entered Vietnam through the border, putting pressure on local breeding farms.

Agricultural experts say WTO impacts on agriculture are clearest seen in cotton. Before Vietnam joined the WTO, many experts warned of this.

In early 2000, Vietnam had tens of thousands of hectares of cotton, meeting nearly 10% of the demand of the textile industry for cotton, but at present the country has just several thousand hectares, satisfying just 3-5% of the requirement of the textile and garment sector, which is developing very quickly. Behind cotton trees are tens of thousands of poor farmer families in the Central Highlands, the southeast and the coastal central regions.

It is sad that Vietnam sends agricultural experts to Africa to help them grow rice and breed cattle and poultry while the modern Vietnam Textile and Garment Corporation has asked Brazil to support Vietnam in growing and processing cotton.

At several recent conferences, some local agricultural officials explained that the cotton fields had disappeared from their localities because processors paid lower prices for cotton than for other products like coffee, pepper, cashew and rubber. But they forgot that Vietnam had entered the WTO so the import tax on cotton fibre is only 3%. So, even when the cotton price increases, Vietnam’s cotton trees will still die because of imported cotton.

In the past two years, the Ministry of Industry and Trade and even the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development haven’t organised any conference or seminar to analyse the impacts of WTO accession on chicken and pig breeders or cotton growers though these are products suffering the biggest impacts from the WTO.

Source: TBKTSG