Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City aims to form a pork trading floor incorporating advanced technology and careful control of pork origin to ensure quality
The Department of Industry and Trade of the far-east Asian country is working on forming the trading floor, allowing direct purchases from pig farmers without intermediaries.
The initiative is in line with Vietnam’s effort to increase higher food safety standards and export pork to large markets such as China and Japan. The city has begun a programme to keep better track of pork origin to ensure higher-quality products.
About 2,644 pig farms and 38 slaughterhouses joined the programme by the end of 2017, according to the Department of Industry and Trade, which has organised around 85 training sessions for Vietnamese farmers.
The programme allows the traders and consumers to avail information about the pork they have bought by scanning the QR code on each pork package.
The city further plans to replace the manual slaughtering activities with machinery by the end of 2018 and make sure every slaughterhouse is equipped with freezers to store pork.
According to the department, in Ho Chi Minh City, 7,500 to 8,000 pigs are supplied each day and about US$500mn worth of pork are consumed each year.
