Rambutan exports to US surge
The Post Entry Quarantine centre 2, under the Plant Protection Department, said rambutan exports to the US surged strongly on the days before the Lunar New Year holiday, with 9-10 containers exported every day.
Nguyen Huu Dat, director of the centre, said this was the record of the recent three weeks. Although rambutan was licensed for export to the US over a year ago, not until November last year were the two sample shipments successfully sent stateside.
Thereafter, the amount of orders for rambutan has been shooting up, from 2-4 containers to 20 containers per week, before hitting the record of 9-10 containers a day now.
As rambutan is well received in the US market, some 7-8 enterprises are attracted to join the export of this kind of fruit, said Dat. In addition, though 100 percent of export rambutan must be tested for plant protection drug residues and other criteria under the US Food Safety modernization Act, no shipment of Vietnam has failed to meet the testing requirements.
Nguyen Thi Hong Thu, director of the fruit export company Chanh Thu in Ben Tre, said the Vietnamese fruits do not have to compete with the products of other countries now given the current off-season harvest. Therefore, local rambutan is strongly consumed, to the point that the output does not satisfy the orders.
Before recording such an achievement, Vietnamese rambutan had been in the waiting for long as it failed to compete with rambutan of South American countries. The price of local rambutan exported via airway was $6.7 per kilo, completely defeated by South American rambutan which was sold at $3 a kilo.
However, Vietnamese rambutan is now sold at over $7 per kilo given the absence of its competitors.
