On the morning of May 22, 2020, the Vietnam Pepper Association (VPA) cooperated with the Vietnam Handicraft Export Association (Vietcraft), the Asia Foundation and the Vietnam Cocoa Coffee Association (Vicofa) to organize the association. Workshop: “Support to traceability of goods and develop exports” in Buon Ma Thuot City, Dak Lak with funding from the Australian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
The seminar is considered a premise to select businesses that are eligible to participate in the project. The seminar welcomed more than 80 participants from representatives of pepper and coffee enterprises and cooperatives and representatives of departments of the Agriculture and Rural Development Departments of Dak Lak and Gia Lai.
Although not a new concept in Vietnam, the topic of traceability has never cooled down because this is considered an indispensable trend when a series of issues about counterfeit, counterfeit, and poor quality goods. became more popular and paid special attention by consumers. For businesses, product traceability is not only a solution to improve the reputation of the business but also to increase the competitiveness of products.
According to Le Ba Ngoc, Vice President of Vietcraft, the activities of the project to support traceability and export development are promising projects because in addition to supporting training costs, software and related documents. In addition, enterprises can also access the costs of participating in fairs and connecting markets. With this benefit has helped businesses reduce anxiety about costs, find output for traceable products before participating in project implementation.
The main activities of the project:
Khởi Kick-off workshop introducing the project in 3 regions (North, Central Highlands and Mekong Delta). Assess needs and select businesses to participate in the project.
Review links and concerns / needs of businesses in 5 commodity groups as a basis for building traceability applications and e-commerce platform.
Hợp Coordinating with state management agencies to study the plan of automatic certification related to the production and business activities of the enterprise.
Building a traceable application of blockchain technology application for users.
Building applications / e-commerce platforms using augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
Support enterprises in updating and operating the traceability system and e-commerce platform.
Support businesses in trade promotion activities in domestic and international markets (linking with distributors, importers, participating in domestic and foreign fairs, visiting learning models …) ).
At the seminar, representatives of VPA and Vicofa presented briefly supply chain issues, traceability, quality certifications and common difficulties of each commodity in traceability and promotion. Commerce.
For the Pepper industry, no country has access to the world through blockchain applications yet because Pepper is mainly cultivated in the extensive form, so the retrieval is very difficult. In addition, in the context of low pepper prices, the implementation of traceability is less concerned even including a country with large-scale and methodical production processes like Brazil. In Vietnam, traceability is a challenging problem when the scale of production is small, fragmented, lacks of chain link, farmers' qualifications are limited to ensure the accuracy and transparency of information. updated. Moreover, infrastructure in key material areas is incomplete, network access is weak, etc.
Before the end of the seminar, the Q&A session was exciting when many questions were asked to the organizers about traceability issues for Vietnam's agricultural products, namely products. Coffee and Pepper. With unresolved problems, the project organizers commit to work specifically with each enterprise on the rights and obligations of the enterprise after registering to participate in the project.
VPA
