Alot of vietnams ridicules China made products, but little did they know the world attention on export quality control is hitting hard on vietnam's bread-n-butter food export industry. Already US is rejecting Vietnam's seafood this yr and soon followed by Japan, EU. I tell you, a toys paint lead to alot of scare, can you imagine food, stuffs that go to people's mouth. Its going to 10X tighter from now on.
Folks like Socal can stop posting vietnam GDP grow so much every year, because the standard is going to tougher and tougher to do business especially on food.

Guess what, now the western countries are starting reject Vietnam's food and Vietnam compensated for that by shoving their inferior food products on poor countries in Asia like Laos, Cambodia, Burma people in their region should really pay attention to that.

===========================================================================
Stink over Vietnamese food exports
By Long S Le

Vietnam's accession earlier this year to the World Trade Organization (WTO) was widely expected to open new and lucrative market opportunities to the country's many ambitious exporters. But since joining the global trade club, many Vietnamese businesses now find that they are actually losing rather than gaining access to certain markets due to growing safety concerns about their products.

That's been particularly true for Vietnam's food businesses, which contribute 55% of exports and around 50% of total national income. In less than two decades, Vietnam has transformed its



once centrally planned and backward agriculture sector into a major engine of export growth, in recent years surging at annual growth rates of over 20%. Vietnam is currently the world's biggest pepper and cashew nut exporter, the second largest exporter of coffee, rice and seafood and among the world's leading exporters of tea, fish sauce, soy sauce, and instant noodles.

The agricultural sector still employs the majority of Vietnam's labor force, with around 11 million Vietnamese small-scale farm owners and businesses, most of whom have land holdings of less than one hectare and who operate as their own farmers and managers. As a small latecomer to several global food markets - including Japan, China, the United States, the European Union and even countries in the 10-country Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) - Vietnamese producers are being saddled by new trade and non-tariff barriers, which are blocking the market opportunities many had banked on for their future profits and growth.

To be sure, that was frequently the case even before Vietnam joined the WTO, particularly for seafood producers. In January 2005, the US Department of Commerce determined that Vietnamese shrimp exporters were guilty of dumping, or selling at prices below production cost which resulted in material injury to US shrimp producers. The department imposed an average 25% punitive tariff rate against a number of Vietnamese shrimp producers.

Several of those sanctioned producers rebounded from the US's market-closing measures, as they were able to find new global outlets for their products, primarily in Japan and the EU. Yet Vietnam's lack of investment in quality assurance and marketing is stymieing Vietnam's drive capitalize on its WTO membership to open more lucrative, developed country marketplaces.

Vietnamese seafood exports to Japan and Europe began to spiral downward this year due to producers' inability to meet their more stringent controls on antibiotic residues and banned chemicals. That includes the Vietnamese seafood industry's continued use of chloramphenicol as a preliminary treatment for fish products to keep the products fresh. The substance has been banned worldwide because it can cause severe health effects, but is still often used in some developing countries, including Vietnam, because of its availability and low cost.

Japan, which had previously been Vietnam's biggest global seafood customer, started as of late last year to test all Vietnamese shrimp and cuttlefish products. Banned antibiotics were still detected after Vietnam joined the WTO in January this year. As a result Japan's ambassador to Vietnam warned in June that if the situation did not improve, his country would consider a total ban on Vietnamese seafood products. Similarly, the EU, which in 2006 purchased about 22% of Vietnam's total fishery shipments, has also recently detected banned antibiotics in Vietnamese catfish and has in turn restricted trade.

Those sanctions are arguably starting to have a spillover effect to other food sectors. China's expected slide in food exports due to recent global concern over its chemically-tainted seafood and juice drinks could have created a competitive opportunity for Vietnam's food exporters. At the moment it doesn't appear that will be realized, as Vietnam is increasingly confronted with similar accusations of poor food quality - although the problems have been played down by state-run media and government officials.

Vietnam's mounting failure to meet food safety standards will likely result in the country missing its $3.6 billion seafood export target for this year, some industry analysts say. And the situation could get worse before it gets better, as American shrimp and catfish producers aggressively lobby their state health agencies to more vigorously test Vietnamese seafood imports. The discovery of antibiotics in imported fish and frozen shrimps by US states Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, where local seafood producers compete for US markets, recently prompted the Food and Drug Administration to take tough action.

In the first six months of 2007, a total of 240 batches of Vietnamese food goods, mainly seafood, were refused entry into the US because they failed to meet basic hygienic standards, according to the FDA. Banned substances detected included salmonella, chloramphenicol, and Aflatoxin, as well as other hazardous additives which were not named on some food's labels.

The rejected shipments included those processed by some of Vietnam's top food exporters, including Seaspime, Mekophar, Cau Tre Enterprise, Frozen Food Company No 4, and Acecook Vietnam Co Ltd. Because these companies are now assumedly on the US FDA's watch list, it could cause Vietnamese seafood exports to the US to fall precipitously since many supermarkets, restaurants and distributors to fast food eateries rely on FDA findings. Meanwhile, local US seafood producers are calling for tougher inspections of competing Vietnamese products, of which they complain less than 1% are currently tested.

Out of quality control
Whether Vietnam can quickly improve its quality controls and keep these lucrative markets open to its exporters is an increasingly crucial economic question. Vietnamese authorities have responded by claiming they have taken more measures to control the quality of exports, but without any clear signs of success. Moreover, there is a lack of public information to accurately evaluate what steps the Vietnamese authorities have or have not taken in response to recent rejected food shipments.

And it's still unclear to many industry analysts what capacity and resources for testing and enforcement of safety regulations are available at Vietnam's National Fisheries Quality Assurance and Veterinary Directorate and the other local inspection agencies. Even if quality control could be made more effective and efficient, it may only underscore that most food-processing practices in Vietnam do not meet international standards, and that there are no real cost-effective alternatives without fully transforming the food-producing sector through the procurement of expensive technologies which would effectively erode the industry's current low-cost advantage.

Bui Chi Buu, head of the Southern Science and Technical Institute in Vietnam, argues that the country's food producers need to invest heavily in post-harvest technology if they want to upgrade the quality of their rice and other food products. Such investment would also significantly reduce the loss of agriculture products after harvest, of which 7% of gross national agricultural products are lost due to pilferage and rot, according to industry experts.

Another major need is to invest in the country's rural transportation infrastructure, cold-chain infrastructure and the privatization of agricultural research that could be refocused to further develop the food export industry. These investments, or government subsidies, are necessary on the theory that there are existing technologies that, in the long run, would be profitable to procure and implement to ensure food quality and safety.

For several Vietnamese food sectors, production methods clearly have to change - and fast. This past summer, a soy sauce scandal - in which a number of soy sauce brands sold in the Vietnamese domestic market were found to have high levels of 3-MCPD, a known cancer-causing substance - represented yet another case in point. The substance is sometimes added by manufacturers to increase protein and cut down production time.

According to state-run media reports, the health inspectors had known about the high levels of the substance beginning in 2001. Since 2004, it was also known that the Czech Republic and Belgium had rejected Vietnamese soy sauce precisely for their excessive 3-MCPD levels, but that no action was taken locally against the violating soy sauce producers, whose products were still being consumed domestically.

In state-run Vietnamese newspapers, it was recently reported that a 2006 state-conducted preventive healthcare study found that 32 out of 33 soy sauce producers were using processes that produced high levels of the cancer-causing substance, but most violators were not financially fit enough to upgrade their processes and stay solvent. The report, however, was never publicly released and while the violating producers were fined, they were not required by the authorities to change their processing practices.

Unless new incentives are put in place for Vietnamese enterprises to adopt best practices and deploy more modern food processing technologies, the emerging market questions about Vietnam's food safety for both domestic and foreign consumption will inevitably grow. Given the government's emphasis on boosting production and seeking out new export markets, Vietnamese food producers have failed to move aggressively to improve their quality and meet international standards because alternatives have been frequently available to them.

A recent EU report found that contaminated Vietnamese seafood exports shipped first to Western markets are not necessarily destroyed but rather shipped to "easier-to-please" Asian markets. Though not necessarily for the same reason, Vietnamese government officials are reportedly now working fast to acquire export licenses to ship seafood exports to the Australian and Russian markets to compensate for expected losses in Japan and the EU.

For many Vietnamese food producers, boosting production is what's primarily associated with generating higher income. This is even more so when Vietnamese producers are faced with lower export commodity prices, of which they are likely to compensate for by employing more intensive farming practices to boost output and oversupplying the market.

That's what happened in the late 1990s when Vietnamese coffee growers, facing historic low prices, oversupplied the market with cheap, robusta coffee which is believed to have contributed to the total collapse of global coffee prices. It has already been alleged that Vietnam, as a new member of the WTO, has resorted to such practices. As of November 2007, at least 30 Vietnamese firms faced various anti-dumping lawsuits, of which four are now under formal investigation. By one count, Vietnam has lost 23 out of 28 dumping cases filed against its exporters and the country has never moved to file its own anti-dumping suit.

Vietnam's world-beating food exports are mostly processed in commodity form and hence are limited in economic value. Meanwhile value-added food goods are often exempt from anti-dumping tariffs and command higher market prices. By many accounts, the uneven quality of Vietnamese rice - the majority is exported unprocessed or poorly processed - makes it inferior to Thailand's technologically scanned and sorted products. Similarly, around 90% of Vietnamese coffee is of the cheap, lower quality robusta variety, which often does not meet the International Coffee Organization's minimum standards.

This, in part, may explain why the prices for both Vietnamese rice and robusta coffee are always at least 15% to 20% lower in world markets than that of their nearest rivals, respectively Thailand and Brazil. This is also true for aqua products, vegetables, and a range of other agricultural commodities that have limited competitiveness in world markets, according to the United Nations’ recently released Global Competitiveness Report.

In today's increasingly cut-throat global food economy, buying improved seeds, having access to updated technical information, and being first to innovate a new type of crop are no longer sufficient to generate higher incomes. The current knowledge, technology and financing systems behind Vietnamese farmers need to be significantly improved if the country is going to meet global production requirements and stay abreast changing market demands.

In the immediate term, Vietnamese food exporters may be able to offset the potential losses from failing to meet developed countries' more stringent standards by ramping up production and selling inferior products to poor countries' at lower prices. At the same time, that approach will sooner or later constrain food exporters' profits and if not well-managed will accentuate an already growing negative reputation about Vietnam as a producer that dumps cheap and often unsafe food products onto the global market.

Long S Le is the director of international initiatives for the Global Studies Program and also a lecturer of Vietnamese studies at the University of Houston in the United States.

If you haven't realized the ethnicity of the writer of this article.

http://www.uh.edu/~lsle/

The writer teaches Vietnamese history, Culture, Politic, etc..

Good for Vietnamese people to critize their own products so we can improve ourselves before a major disaster happens like the Lead poisoning recall that has not tainted China's reputation.

Maybe the lead poisoning crisis could have been averted if more nationalistic Chinese were critizing themselves instead of acting like tools and praising China for everything. But I did see a few who critized their own government, so maybe there is hope we will have less tainted products.

yeah, meanwhile, we have to make sure everybody know it, especially the poors from other countries so that they can make a decision whether to buy. Until then, as of now, vietnam export food stinks!

Good luck on your one man forum crusade on trying to deter the world from buying Vietnamese exports.

Too bad for you that I don't have to do a thing and plenty of companies are now recalling Chinese made products.

Seriously.

Doesn't it apply to all developing country?

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2007/12...n_growth_8.html

"yeah, meanwhile, we have to make sure everybody know it, especially the poors from other countries so that they can make a decision whether to buy. Until then, as of now, vietnam export food stinks! thumbsdown.gif"



Seems like u are just criticizing vietnam and it's products. If u care so much vietnam's exports, why don't you help find a solution to the problem since u criticize so well.

The agronomical area still employs the majority of Vietnam's activity force, with about 11 actor Vietnamese small-scale acreage owners and businesses, a lot of of whom accept acreage backing of beneath than one hectare and who accomplish as their own farmers and managers. As a baby latecomer to several all-around aliment markets - including Japan, China, the United States, the European Union and even countries in the 10-country Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) - Vietnamese producers are getting saddled by new barter and non-tariff barriers, which are blocking the bazaar opportunities abounding had banked on for their approaching profits and growth.

_________________
Toaster