To let "green gold" penetrate the big market

YenBai - In recent years, cinnamon has become one of the main crops helping people in Yen Bai to eliminate hunger and reduce poverty. From this crop, many households have stabilized their lives and become rich. However, it is still difficult for the "green gold" to penetrate the international market.

Products extracted from cinnamon essential oil are popular with consumers.

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In Van Yen district, cinnamon trees, once a poverty alleviation tree, are now a tree that enriches people. The revenue from cinnamon trees brings Van Yen people over 700 billion VND each year, with an average income per capita of about 4 million VND, contributing to building a more and more innovative, prosperous and strong highland region. However, in addition to the natural strengths of the input, deep processing and consumption are still limited, the supply chain is not well organized, and marketing capacity and market understanding are weak.

Access to international export markets is still difficult. The area of ​​organic cinnamon has begun to develop but is still very small, less than 7% of the total area, and the products are not diversified. The supply chain has not been organized and implemented effectively, especially the formation of cooperatives and cooperatives to connect with businesses. On the other hand, for cinnamon and cinnamon products, we currently do not have the concept of organic. Deep processing only stops at essential oils. In addition, the stages related to logistics and product promotion still have many difficulties affecting the development of the industry.

Chemical residues/heavy metal content in cinnamon products exceeding export standards is one of the challenges for Vietnamese cinnamon in general and Yen Bai cinnamon in particular. Chemical residues/heavy metal content in cinnamon products exceeding export standards of the EU and US markets are lead and mercury.

In addition, there is a situation that is also happening a lot with cinnamon, which is 2 active ingredients in pesticides including Glyphosate (found in herbicides) and Chlorpyrifos (found in pesticides). Although these 2 active ingredients have been banned from use and trade in Vietnam, they still appear a lot in cinnamon products.

With the active ingredient Chlorpyrifos, the EU and US markets allow this content to be 0.01 PPM, so with this index, it is almost 0. To improve competitiveness and meet the requirements for cinnamon export quality criteria, many processing facilities have changed towards cleaner production, meeting ISO standards, creating clean, organic products.

Therefore, fresh cinnamon raw materials need to be grown organically, without residues of pesticides exceeding the permitted threshold. Recognizing the benefits of clean cinnamon production, organic cinnamon raw materials not only increase the cinnamon essential oil content but also have superior essential oil quality, meeting the requirements of international customers. In particular, the selling price is very high, which helps the cooperative purchase raw materials from people at a price 20% to 30% higher than regular cinnamon.

In addition to applying organic farming methods, cinnamon growers are provided with cinnamon varieties with clear origin and source, disease-free trees; during the care process, no herbicides or chemical fertilizers are used, cinnamon must be 4 years old or older, and pruning is limited to ensure that the amount of essential oil does not decrease. On the Yen Bai side, in addition to preserving the high-quality native small-leaf, red-tip cinnamon varieties, the province has supported farmers in applying advanced techniques to intensively cultivate organic cinnamon, increase density, shorten the exploitation cycle, and increase biomass per unit area.

Thanks to that, after 3 years, the area of ​​organic cinnamon cultivation has increased rapidly, 4 times higher than the plan, preserving pure cinnamon on an area of ​​15 hectares to create an annual source of cinnamon seeds. Up to now, the total area certified for organic cinnamon cultivation meeting international standards is over 4,500 hectares, however, through the mechanism of linking according to the value chain between people and processing enterprises, the actual area of ​​organic cinnamon has reached about 20 thousand hectares. A typical example of organic cinnamon cultivation and production is Van Yen district, which has given cinnamon the best quality in the country due to its high essential oil content.

The area of ​​organic cinnamon cultivation is continuously increasing. To develop the "green gold" tree sustainably and increase its value, localities plan to develop concentrated and specialized cinnamon areas, comply with State regulations on food safety, disease safety, and environmental protection; at the same time, promote the linkage between production and consumption of cinnamon products.

The province also supports people to replicate cinnamon growing models in the direction of intensive and organic farming, aiming to grant sustainable forest management certificates, bringing Yen Bai cinnamon products to penetrate large, high-value markets such as Europe, the US, Japan, etc.; linking cinnamon production to the value chain from production, exploitation, processing and product consumption, focusing on deep processing and refined processing to bring high-value products.

According to statistics from the Yen Bai agricultural sector, currently, the whole province has over 80,000 hectares of cinnamon grown in Van Yen, Tran Yen, Luc Yen, Van Chan districts, each year producing a total output of 22,000 tons of dry cinnamon bark, nearly 600 tons of cinnamon essential oil and over 70,000 m3 of various types of cinnamon wood, the total value of profits from cinnamon trees in the whole province reaches over 1,000 billion VND. In the province, there are 17 large-scale cinnamon essential oil extraction factories using boiler technology to distill essential oils with a capacity of 1,000 tons of products/year. In addition, Yen Bai also has more than 400 small-scale household cinnamon essential oil processing facilities mainly operating manually, with a capacity of about 200 tons/year...

Quang Thieu

Source: http://baoyenbai.com.vn/12/347724/De-vang-xanh-tham-nhap-thi-truong-lon.aspx