Vietnam’s coffee export has been affected by dropping prices over the past six months which brought the export value down by 12 percent year-on-year despite an increase in volume, said the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.

In the first half of the year, the country exported 741,000 tonnes of coffee, a year-on-year increase of 23 percent for only 1.1 billion USD.

The current coffee prices are cheaper by an average 500 USD per tonne compared to one year ago, despite a short-lived increase in early June.

A sudden drop of 70 USD per tonne overnight on June 15 at the London trading floor immediately pushed the prices of coffee in Vietnam down by 800 VND per kilo in compared to the previous week.

The Vietnam Coffee and Cacao Association (Vicofa) has advised enterprises to keep close watch of the market and share information with each other to minimise risks in signing export contracts.

The association also recommended that businesses invest more in processing to export processed products instead of raw coffee.

Vietnam’s coffee markets also saw changes when Belgium emerged as the country’s largest coffee importer instead of German. German ranked second and followed by the US.

The country now has about 500,000 ha of coffee farms, leading the world in out put of Robusta coffee. It has set the target of earning 1.6 billion USD from coffee exports this year./.