HCMCity (VNA) – A stronger marketing strategy coupled with substantialimprovement in tra fish quality is needed to bolster the export of the fish asrough seas are still ahead for this product, experts said.

Incorrect and defamatory information broadcast by foreign media hurt Vietnamesetra fish exports in the second quarter of the year, To Thi Tuong Lan, DeputyGeneral Secretary of the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers(VASEP), said.

The smear campaign targeting Vietnamese tra fish resulted in a decrease in theshipments to many European countries in Q2. Exports to Spain experienced the sharpestfall of 67 percent in the period, she added.

However, the situation has improved greatly in the third quarter, after aseries of actions taken by domestic tra fish exporters. They set up websites inSpanish, English, Dutch and Italian to provide their target consumers with sufficientinformation on fish products, from cultivating to packaging processes, as wellas nutrition ingredients in each product. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram alsoserved as effective channels to persuade foreigners to choose Vietnamese trafish.

The moves help Vietnamese tra fish export gain a year-on-year increase of 8.2percent to over 1 billion USD in the first eight months of the year. Shipmentsto the EU went up 23 percent, China 43 percent, Brazil 58 percent and the US8.4 percent.

Along with improving prestige for Vietnamese tra fish through the media,scientific articles and research papers published internationally also play acrucial role, Lan highlighted.

“There are only 21 articles about Vietnamese tra fish made public on foreign websitesand media system while the number of those on the US cod is over 2,000”, shesaid.

On the other hand, to ensure fish product quality, the Government has also issuedDecree 55/2017/ND-CP regulating standards for tra fish farming, processing andexports.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development also joined hands with theMinistry of Science and Technology to build a national catfish programme andpilot a high value production chain, which proved its success at the Vinh Hoangroup in the Mekong Delta province of Dong Thap.-VNA