Buon Ma Thuot, Vietnam, Dec. 18 - Vietnam will see its negligible cocoa crop swell to 45,000 tonnes by 2015 as it ramps up output slowly, a government official said.
The country, the world's largest robusta coffee producer and a major rice grower, will ship just 300 tonnes of cocoa next year, making it a bit player against industry giants such as the Ivory Coast.
"By 2015 the benefit will come with a crop of economic viability," Nguyen Van Hoa, deputy director of the Agriculture Ministry's Planting Department, told Reuters.
The area planted would expand to 80,000 hectares by 2020 to provide 108,000 tonnes of cocoa, 86,000 tonnes of which would be shipped, he said on the sidelines of a conference.
Vietnam has been developing cocoa slowly to avoid a repeat of the overplanting in its coffee crop in the late 1990s that led to a crash in world prices in 2001.
"Now overplantation is not a concern as the industry has just started. In the long-run it might become an issue but the land for agriculture in Vietnam is limited and forest destruction is strictly prohibited," Hoa, also a deputy head of the government's committee overseeing cocoa sector development, said
Output, while expected to grow quickly, is still insignificant when compared with Ivory Coast or Ghana, the world's number one and two cocoa producers that between them harvest more than 2 million tonnes a year of beans.
"We have also received support from the Agriculture Ministry of Holland, and trading firms such as Cargill, ED&F Man being here buying cocoa shows the investment in Vietnam is promising," Hoa said.
U.S. agro-product firm Cargill, which processes 525,000 tonnes of cocoa a year or 15 percent of the world's output, wants to buy 20,000 tonnes of Vietnamese cocoa annually, Nguyen Vinh Thanh, cocoa purchasing manager for Cargill Vietnam Ltd, said.
"The buying demand is huge, but Vietnam's production is still extremely small," Thanh told farmers, industry officials and foreign buyers at the conference. ($1=16,115 dong)