SOURCE: Moeun Chhean Nariddh, Khmer Times
Three years ago, Chheng Ros, a 58-year-old farmer in Kampong Cham province’s Kang Meas district, made a blunderous decision to cut down all his banana trees to make way for mango farming which was getting more expensive than bananas.
Three years later, the father of two says he deeply regretted his mistake to turn his banana farm into a mango farm.
“Now, the price of mango is plummeting even at the beginning of the harvest season,” Ros laments as he trades blame with his wife for not selling their mangoes earlier when some middlemen approached them and offered to buy their mangoes for 12.50 cents per kilogram.
“It serves you right,” he blames his 55-year-old wife, Hour Khim, “I told you to sell them, but you said no.”
“But, you didn’t listen to me when I told you not to cut down our banana trees three years ago,” Khim responds, twisting her mouth.
“Ok, now we are even,” Ros replies, laughing. “Let’s stop blaming each other.”
A few days ago, Khim says the middlemen returned and offered to buy their mangos only for 7.50 cents per kilogram
“We have sold 400 kilograms of green mangoes and we have received only $30,” she says, adding that it is much less than the price of fertilizers which cost them around $100.
However, not only the couple in Kang Meas district has faced the challenge of low mango price. Virtually all mango farmers in Kampong Cham province are having the same problem.
Like Ros and Khim, their 56-year-old neighbor, Seang Maly, says she has so far sold her mangoes and received only enough money to pay for the fertilizers.
“If the price of mango remains the same, I will be able to receive only around $250 from the sale of my mangoes this year,” she says. “So, how can we live with such a small income from the sale of mangoes?”
Meanwhile, farmers who have mango farms far from the villages seem to have made a better income as they use chemical spray to help germinate the mango trees which bear more fruits earlier in the season.
“I could sell my mangoes for 20 cents per kilogram,” says 60-year-old Neung Veng, adding that the price has now dropped to only ten cents per kilogram.
If the price of mango does not go down further, Veng says he hopes he can reap about $1,500 this year from his small mango farm.
“As I am also doing rice farming, this amount of income will help me make ends meet,” he says.
However, things do not look too bad for mango farmers who have large-scale farms and can supply ripe mangoes to mango processing factories.
Lu Song, general manager of Long Wo Fruit Industry Co., Ltd., said the company began exporting dried mangoes from Cambodia to China in 2017 and that with the increase in market demand, the export volume has risen rapidly, reaching about 1,500 tonnes per year.
“Although the COVID-19 pandemic has affected sales this year, there is still strong demand on the Chinese market for Cambodian dried mangoes,” Lu Song told Xinhua News Agency in December 2020.
Lu hopes to use dried mangoes as a star product to open up the Chinese market, gradually establishing a complete industrial chain covering mango planting, processing, and export, and extending it to more fruit-related products.
Chen Qisheng, general manager of China Certification & Inspection Group (CCIC)’s Cambodian branch, said that thanks to the free trade agreement signed between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), Cambodia’s dried mango exports to China enjoy tariff preferences.
He said currently, there are more than 20 Chinese companies engaged in dried mango processing in Cambodia.
Huang Kejin, managing director of Cam MJ Industrial Park, which was launched at the end of 2019, said the first project his park attracted was a dried mango processing factory.
“The factory has not only solved the problem of local fruit farmers’ difficulty in exporting mangoes but also promoted local employment,” he told Xinhua.
Kejin is optimistic about the export prospect of Cambodia’s dried mangoes to China, saying that next year, a total of three dried mango processing lines in the park will be put into operation, needing about 42,000 tonnes of mangoes a year.
According to the Chinese News Agency, in October last year, China and Cambodia signed a bilateral free trade agreement, and in November, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) trade deal was signed among 10 Asean countries and China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
Cambodia and China signed in June last year a protocol on phytosanitary requirements that would pave the way for the export of fresh mangoes from Cambodia to China.
“We hope to export our fresh mangoes to China officially in the near future,” Cambodia’s Agriculture Minister Veng Sakhon has told media. “When the export starts, I believe that a market shortage will no longer concern our farmers.”
According to the minister, Cambodian mango farmers have planted more than 124,000 hectares of mango trees, yielding around 1.44 million tonnes of fresh mangoes per annum.
“The upcoming export of fresh mangoes to China will contribute to economic growth and poverty reduction in Cambodia’s rural areas,” he said.
However, small-scale mango farmers like those in Kang Meas district may not benefit from the Chinese market this year.
Lay Senghong, chief of Kang Meas district’s Sdao commune, acknowledges that the price of mango has dropped in his commune and other districts in Kampong Cham.
“Big factories only buy mangoes from large-scale mango farms,” he says, adding that only local traders come to buy mangoes at small farms like in his commune to supply local markets.
“This year, they buy mangoes at a very cheap price,” he says.
Senghong says about 20 percent of around 6,000 people in his commune have small mango farms in addition to doing rice farming and growing vegetables and other fruit crops.
Hopefully, in the near future, small-scaled mango farmers will benefit from the Chinese market and mango farmers like Ros and Khim will not need to cut down their mango trees and plant banana trees again.