Cashew farming land shrinks in 8 consecutive years

A representative from the Department of Plant Protection said cashew farming area has shrunken for eight successive years at a meeting on sustainable cashew development held in the southern province of Binh Phuoc’s Dong Xoai District yesterday, said

Workers are processing cashew for export (Photo: SGGP)

The meeting was presided by the Agriculture and Rural Development Minister Nguyen Xuan Cuong with the participation of representatives of its sub-departments in provinces where grow cashew for export.

As per the Department of Plant Protection, the farming areas has shrunken from 440,000 hectares to 290,000 hectares.

However, in 2017, the area increased to 297,498 hectare. The Southeast area has the biggest cashew farming area in the country with 183,700 hectare in 2017 with productivity of 140,600 tons accounting for 61.6 percent of the country’s total areas and 66.6 percent in term of quantity. Next includes the central highlands and coastal central regions.

The southern province of Binh Phuoc has the largest farming area of cashew. However, in the 2015 – 2016 crop the productivity fell due to dry weather. Worse, in year end of 2016 and early 2017 unseasonable rains lowered the productivity more.

Nevertheless, Vietnam’s cashew productivity is still higher than the world’s average productivity with 600 kilogram per hectare.

In the period 2005-2015, raw cashew surged by 2.3 percent a year with the productivity of 352,000 tons yet farming areas decreased by 4.8 percent yearly.

Last year, because of low productivity, quantity of raw cashew also dropped to 210,899 tons.

The Vietnam Cashew Association said that in 2016, just 1.5 million cashew material for processing or the domestic supply material just accounted for 31.67 percent.

Representatives said that they have taken heed to developing cashew chain in each region in a bid to increase its productivity and investment more in processing with adoption of hi-tech and selection of seedling. Especially, departments of agriculture and rural development encouraged farmers to link with enterprises to build large scale cooperatives.

Local administrations and enterprises petitioned the Ministry to have proper policy to support the cashew sector.

Speaking at the meeting, Minister Nguyen Xuan Cuong said within 30 recent years, the cashew sector has developed drastically to pave the way for a brand name for Vietnamese cashew. The sector is becoming a major pillar in agricultural export. It offered 11 million employment for local laborers.

So far, over 400 processing units are located in the country to pave the way for a cashew processing industry.

Minister Cuong affirmed that because cashew produces little income , the sector will not expand farming areas by 2030 but focus on re-structuring the sector to better it. He advised enterprises to concentrate on building new model for growing and finding stable counterparts.