Deputy Prime Minister: Moving towards mandatory traceability of agricultural products

Speaking at the announcement ceremony of the Vietnamese Agricultural Product Traceability System on June 30 in Hanoi, the Deputy Prime Minister said that traceability is no longer a separate requirement of some products or a few export markets but has become an inevitable trend in quality management, information transparency and protecting consumer rights.

“If you want agriculture to develop sustainably, you must build a brand and do a good job of traceability to conquer demanding markets,” he said.

According to the Deputy Prime Minister, the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment putting the Agricultural Product Traceability System into operation is an important step in digital transformation of the agricultural sector, contributing to transparency of the entire production chain, tracing the origin of agricultural products, thereby improving quality, maintaining reputation and increasing the value of Vietnamese agricultural products in the international market.

He said the agricultural sector continues to play a supporting role in the economy and is the only sector that completed the targets set in the first 6 months of the year. After 5 months, agricultural, forestry and fishery export turnover reached more than 31 billion USD. With the current growth momentum, the export target of 74 billion USD in 2026 is completely attainable.

“Every dollar of agricultural, forestry and fishery exports is associated with the livelihoods of millions of farmers, contributing to ensuring social security and promoting national development,” the Deputy Prime Minister emphasized.

According to him, Vietnam currently has about 9 million farming households with small scale production, this is a big challenge in making production and consumption chains transparent. Therefore, the implementation of traceability needs to be focused and focused, with immediate priority given to key commodity industries, products with large output, high economic value and serving key export markets such as China, the European Union (EU) and the US.

On that basis, the Government will continue to improve mechanisms, standards, data infrastructure and traceability systems to gradually expand to product groups that have high management requirements or must meet strict regulations of the import market.

Agreeing with the proposal for mandatory research on traceability, he emphasized that this must be considered a tool to control quality, improve value and competitiveness, not an additional administrative procedure.

He requested the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment and relevant ministries and branches to continue to review and simplify administrative procedures; build mechanisms to connect, share and authenticate data; At the same time, support businesses, cooperatives and people to participate in the system in a way that is simple, convenient and consistent with actual production.

At the ceremony, the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment officially announced the Vietnam Agricultural Product Traceability System after a pilot period with exported durian products. The system is built as a national-level shared traceability platform, serving people, businesses and management agencies in looking up, authenticating and sharing data about the entire production, processing and distribution chain of agricultural products.

The system includes three components: a lookup portal for people; management system for management agencies, businesses and entities in the value chain; same application on mobile devices. The platform applies electronic digital signatures, blockchain technology, product identifiers according to international GS1 standards and GS1 Digital Link QR codes to ensure authenticity, transparency and data integrity.

The system is capable of processing about 1,000 lookups per second, meeting 30,000 people scanning retrieval codes at the same time and more than 85 million scans per day. To date, the system has integrated data on more than 18,500 products belonging to 181 product groups from 170 businesses in 24 out of 34 provinces and cities. With the pilot program to trace the origin of durian exports, 16 businesses participated, of which 6 containers were successfully exported to China through the Ministry’s electronic system.

In the coming time, the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment will continue to expand the system to key agricultural, forestry and fishery groups, export products and items with high requirements for quality, food safety and transparency of origin; At the same time, support localities, businesses, cooperatives and people to participate, aiming to form a unified agricultural data ecosystem to serve the digital transformation of the agricultural sector.