Keeping Brand of Việt Nam’s Dragon Fruit

One of the main crops in the Southern provinces, has been developed and expanded by farmers to an increasingly larger area. This crop has contributed to effectively using the agricultural land fund; improving famer’s income and stabilizing the farmer’s life. However, there are also obstacles that need to be supported to improve product quality; processing process, contribution of value chains, as well as sustainably development of the brand of Việt Nam’s dragon fruit.

As a hi-tech agricultural development agency in the Southern region; NACENTECH Ho Chi Minh, Branch has focused on research, application; testing and transferring of new technologies to agricultural production in the Southern provinces.

Recognizing the importance of sustainable development of this cultivar; recently, the Branch of National Center for Technological Progress has carried out a survey program at many places to learn more about it; through that has a realistic view and boldly proposes solutions to reduce the current difficulties for farmers and processing firms.

With the aim of developing sustainable dragon trees, the provinces are currently implementing many solutions to improve the value chain such as; production according to VietGAP, GlobalGAP standards; promotion to expand consumption markets; develop new varieties of dragon fruit to replace the current degraded trees; diversify products and improve productivity, quality and economic efficiency of this crop. In addition to changing the traditional production practices of farmers, but also improving the competitive value of it in the export market, and especially opening a sustainable direction for dragon fruit at the time ‘’big crops, low prices’’.

In addition to the above measures; the provinces had also encourage the development of the dragon fruit processing industry and support enterprises to invest in their factories to produce varieties of products which from dragon fruits such as: dried dragon fruit, juice, wine, cakes, jams, candies ..etc., in order to reduce the pressure of fresh fruit consumption.

Through the survey, although delighted with changes as there have been positive results. However, there are still many limitations such as:

• Not yet implemented synchronously from production to packaging, preliminary processing and preservation facilities for export.
• The development of dragon fruit trees in the provinces was still mainly spontaneous, small scale and not systematic, so the application of new science and technology was still limited. The growing area increased rapidly without paying attention to the issue of consumption.
• The output of dragon fruit of the provinces increased speedily; but the consumption market is precarious, mainly to the Chinese market.
• The percentage of farmer that producing according to VietGAP and GlobalGAP standards was still low.
• The tranfer of technical advances has not been promoted, especially high-tech production models.
• Processing enterprises have not been able to access preferential capital to expand their production.
• The local and foreign cooperation has been delayed to improve production capacity
• Product consumption and the competition in the international market.

With the function of being a high-tech research and application unit, a pioneer in the applied science and technology to agricultural production, NACENTECH HCM has boldly proposed and offered key solutions to higher leaders. Thereby, creating a breakthrough in productivity, in quality and economic efficiency, contributing to improving the value chain of dragon fruit in a sustainable direction, targeting the depth, focus on improving the quality and value, maintain the Vietnamese dragon fruit brand.