Cocoa trees are intercropped in coconut garden in harvesting period of a households in Cho Gao district. (Photo: Dinh Hue / VNA)

However, the development of cocoa area as well as the procurement problem, semi-processed particles still need to remove difficulties.

According to Mr. Nguyen Van Hoa, Ben Tre is one of the leading provinces of our country on cocoa area. The majority of cocoa in Ben Tre is intercropped in coconut garden has helped farmers increase their income almost doubled over the same area. In particular, high quality cocoa beans in Ben Tre are appreciated highly by many corporation, large enterprises specialized on purchasing or producing chocolate like Cargill, Puratos Grand Place. 

However, the representative participated on the conference said that cocoa is still the new plant but having many pests; planting techniques and care, preliminary processing quite complicated and new for farmers; In addition, cocoa were also competed stiffly with some other fruit trees like green grapefruit, orange, lemon... so farmers discouraged with this plant. In addition, system acquisition, preliminary processing unbuilt sync also caused many difficulties for farmers that they "turned away" with cocoa.

To develop a sustainable cocoa for the Mekong Delta in the up coming time, many representative participated in the conference said that localities should implement synchronous solutions from the research stage, select varieties for growers, and transfer growing techniques, care, and pest control for farmers. In particular, the development of cocoa cultivation should be more concentrated, each area must reach at least 20 hectares to facilitate the purchase and preliminaly processing of businesses.

In addition, businesses need to raise the reward for cocoa in compliance with UTZ certified certification – certified good inside certification of agricultural products in order to encourage farmers to cultivate in accordance with this standard.

According to Ben Tre’s Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, the province has nearly 5,000 ha of cocoa, decresed nearly 1/2 compared with 2012. The reason dues to low prices led farmers to cut down cocoa massily in late 2012, started to convert the new plant in 2013 such as green grapefruit, orange, lemon. Currently Ben Tre province has 127 purchasing places, preliminary processing of cocoa beans, the basic collection and pre-processing cocoa timely for  farmers.

Notably, some companies, large corporations such as Cargill, Puratos Grand Place, Mars have long advocated sticking to the local by constructing the buying station systems, preliminary treatment, in which the Puratos Grand Place company was constructed and put into operation the primary processing plant beans with capacity of 2,000 tons / year. /.

Source: tintucnongnghiep