Representatives of tea-growing regions and tea companies in Viet Nam recently took part in a seminar in New York to seek opportunities to enter the US market.

At the conference, experts spoke about Viet Nam’s long history of growing tea and the huge potential for Viet Nam’s tea products in the US market. Peter Goggi, president of the US Tea Association, said the US is a potential market for Viet Nam, provided its high standards for quality and food safety can be fulfilled.

Participants said Viet Nam’s green tea producers should join value chains and use more technologies in production and processing to improve the quality of tea products, which will satisfy tough markets such as the US.

It was also recommended that Vietnamese tea companies work on building their brands.

Viet Nam’s tea industry provides jobs to around 354,000 farmers, significantly contributing to reducing poverty and to rural development. The country is one of the seven leading tea producers and the fifth largest tea exporter in the world. Around 124,000 hectares in the country is devoted to growing tea and produces 500,000 tonnes of dry tea every year.

A group of Vietnamese tea enterprises is going through a competitiveness improvement programme funded by the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs of Switzerland so as to enter the American markets.

Addressing the seminar, Ambassador Nguyen Phuong Nga, head of the Permanent Vietnamese Mission to the United Nations, praised Vietnamese tea firms that won awards at an international tea competition in Canada last year. The awards have created a good impression of the country’s tea industry in the international market and will help build a national trademark for our tea, she said. — VNS