Việt Nam shipped its first boxes of rambutan to New Zealand on October 3 after seven years of negotiation on exporting this fruit to the market, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.

Việt Nam is the first country granted a licence to export fresh rambutan to the Pacific country, reported baodautu.vn.

The exports this time had 520 boxes containing 2 kilos of rambutan each. The exported rambutan to New Zealand were approved by the ministry’s Plant Protection Department. The fruits were packaged and labeled under New Zealand’s standards.

This is the third kind of Vietnamese fruit after dragon fruit and mango entering New Zealand, a country with strict quarantine requirements.

In April, Việt Nam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Embassy of New Zealand officially announced Việt Nam had permission to export its rambutan to New Zealand. This followed seven years of negotiation and efforts to meet standards on regions of cultivation, packaging, labeling, radiation treatment and quarantine.

The export of rambutan to New Zealand would open more opportunities to ship this fruit to other markets around the world.

Export volume of Vietnamese rambutan has reached more than 20,000 tonnes to markets such as the US, China, Canada, the EU, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and ASEAN.

Rambutan is grown mainly in southern provinces on an area of more than 50,000 ha, providing 300,000 tonnes a year to the local market.

VNS