HANOI, March 6 (Xinhua) -- Coffee exports from Vietnam, the world's largest robusta beans supplier, is forecast to fall in 2022/23 due to a drop in the planting area and shrinking stockpiles, local newspaper Vietnam News reported on Monday.
Vietnam is forecast to harvest 1.47 million tons of coffee beans from its 2022/23 crop, down between 10 and 15 percent from the previous crop year as coffee farmers were shifting to other profitable fruit trees, said Do Ha Nam, chairman of the Intimex Group and deputy head of the Vietnam Coffee and Cocoa Association.
Vietnam, which stands only behind Brazil in terms of global coffee production, has also seen its hoard of coffee beans shrinking, said the chairman of the Intimex, a state-owned company partly focusing on agricultural product processing and export, and predicted a decline in the country's annual export volume.
Vietnam has maintained a coffee stockpile to prevent prices from plummeting once a new crop reaches the market. Under the government's approval of domestic stockpiling, coffee exporters buy a certain amount of coffee beans and keep them out of market circulation for a period of time.
The country's coffee shipments in January and February stood at 323,000 tons, down 13.1 percent from a year earlier, according to the General Statistics Office.
Coffee export revenue for the same period reached 703 million U.S. dollars, down 14.6 percent year on year, data showed.
Experts said that to maintain consistent increases in productivity and value, Vietnam would have to re-map growing areas, apply advances in mechanization and irrigation technology, and improve selective crop breeding techniques.
Vietnam aims to achieve 6 billion U.S. dollars in coffee exports by 2030. Last year, it earned a record high of 3.9 billion U.S. dollars from exporting 1.7 million tons, data showed.
The Southeast Asian country's coffee farming covers lands of an estimated 600,000 hectares. Its largest coffee-growing area in the Central Highlands accounts for about 90 percent of the total output. ■