Global Agriculture

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and PepsiCo have made an overall assessment, removing bottlenecks to develop potatoes

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27 October 2022, Vietnam: Talking to PepsiCo leaders, Deputy Minister Le Quoc Doanh said it was necessary to remove bottlenecks in varieties, competitiveness, economic efficiency… to develop potatoes in Vietnam.

On the morning of October 24, Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Le Quoc Doanh had a meeting with Ms. Monica Bauer, Vice President of External Relations of PepsiCo Group. Ms. Bauer emphasized the importance of the Vietnamese market to PepsiCo’s development strategy.

With more than 13,000 employees working for PepsiCo in Vietnam, Ms. Bauer affirmed that the company still wants to invest and further expand the scale of operations in Vietnam, such as developing potato-growing areas in the Central Highlands.

Currently, PepsiCo is supporting potato farmers in the Central Highlands in terms of finance, technology and especially farmers who are women or ethnic minorities.

However, currently potato production in Vietnam has not yet met PepsiCo’s demand for raw materials, so it still has to be imported from other countries, accompanied by strict standards to ensure safety standards

Therefore, Ms. Bauer wishes to receive support from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development to be able to assess the specific plant risks for each country where PepsiCo is importing potatoes.

Receiving information from Ms. Bauer, Deputy Minister Le Quoc Doanh first welcomed PepsiCo’s participation and effective operation in the PPP Task Force on Fruits and Vegetables.

Referring more deeply to the problem of growing potatoes in Vietnam, Deputy Minister Le Quoc Doanh said that the area for this crop is currently only about 20,000-25,000 ha/year. The reason is that the demand for potatoes of Vietnamese people has decreased and the economic efficiency is not high, so farmers have many other options instead of growing potatoes.

Besides, another difficulty with this crop is that the price of seed potatoes is still high, difficult to preserve, so the area is increasingly narrow. Therefore, Deputy Minister Le Quoc Doanh suggested that there should be an overall assessment of the potato crop to remove the bottleneck step by step towards the goal of meeting 100% of PepsiCo’s raw material needs in Vietnam.

More specifically, the Deputy Minister suggested that PepsiCo could develop potatoes in the spring crop in the northern mountainous region and the winter crop in the Red River Delta provinces.

However, the leaders of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development noted that each region needs to have its own assessment and solutions for current problems such as varieties, competitiveness, economic efficiency

Also Read: List of pesticides restricted and banned for use in Agriculture in India

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