Starting on May 1, Vietnam’s Guangxi Province has resumed the normal procedure for customs clearance at the specialized clearance line at the Tan Thanh – Po Chai border gate. However, according to Deputy Minister Tran Quoc Khanh of the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT), currently, the customs clearance capacity at border gates in the North, especially the loading and unloading capacity, has not returned to normalcy yet as measures to prevent the disease are still applied strictly.

This will affect the consumption and export of many types of fruits and agricultural products of Vietnam, including lychees.

Having predicted this great challenge, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) has recently formed a delegation to inspect the actual situation and discuss with the authorities of Bac Giang Province on the consumption scenarios of lychees for farmers. Minister Nguyen Xuan Cuong led the delegation to visit lychee orchards grown under the GlobalGap standards to export to the Japanese market in Tan Yen District.

According to Mr. Duong Van Thai, Chairman of the People’s Committee of Bac Giang Province, the total area of lychee trees in the province is 28,100 hectares this year with an estimated output of around 160,000 tons. Farmers will start harvesting lychees from May 20 and the harvest time is expected to last until July. Thus, the production of lychees this year will be as high as last year.

If successfully, 2020 will be the first year that Vietnamese fresh lychees are exported to Japan, paving the way for the fruit to conquer other choosy but potential markets.

It was reported that, according to the Chairman of the People’s Committee of Bac Giang Province, in case of the worst scenario that lychees will not be able to export, the province will focus on exploiting the domestic market because this is a potential market with a population of around 100 million people. If the domestic market is boosted well, there is no need to worry about consumption.