Passion fruit farms next to coffee farms in Chu Pah District. The district is currently the largest passion fruit growing area in Gia Lai.
Across the district, there are currently 500 hectares of passion fruit farms.
Ro Cham Ja, a 60-year-old farmer in Chu Pah, has just destroyed a coffee farm he had founded and been farming since 2005.
Ja said that after almost two decades, his coffee trees were too old to create high-yield crops. He also said input costs for coffee were too high and the crops demanded too much maintenance from his family.
Coffee tree trunks are sold as firewood in Gia Lai, which plays a major part in Vietnam's robusta coffee supply and in earning the country fame as a top coffee exporter.
Ro Cham Vui stands in his family's passion fruit garden after he destroyed 500 coffee trees.
He and his wife have invested VND50 million (US$2,128) in the passion fruit farm, which is now 20 days old.
Vui said his family has never cultivated passion fruit, but the fact that the price for the crop has doubled from VND10,000 to VND20,000 per kilo prompted he and his wife to take the chance. He says he has seen many farmers earn profits of hundreds of millions dong on their new passion fruit farms after just six months.
Some farmers recycle coffee trees to make scaffolds.
Le Van Thanh, director of an agricultural cooperative in Chu Pah, said many farmers have been rushing to grow passion fruits without having a proper plan on how to sell it.
Passion fruit at a farm in Gia Lai’s Mang Yang District. The province now has 4,500 hectares of passion fruit in total.
Vietnam obtained official permission to sell passion fruit to China last July. Apart from the northern neighbor, Vietnamese passion fruit also being exported to the EU, Malaysia, South Korea and several countries in the Americas.
However, with so many farmers switching from coffee to passion fruit, Gia Lai authorities have taken action to review output in the province to avoid oversupply.
