Addressing a conference on the application of the standards, deputy minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Luong Le Phuong, said coffee exporters would not be required to apply the standards this year because the ministry believed they needed more time to prepare.

However, Phuonng said producers and exporters would be required to immediately overcome some shortcomings such as the levels of moisture in their coffee.

The use of the new quality standards to thoroughly check coffee for export before it can be cleared by customs will be stringently applied from October 2010, Phuong said.

Although the new standards will not be formally applied to this crop, Phuong said the Vietnam Coffee and Cocoa Association should call on the country's 10 biggest coffee exporters, which account for 60 to 70% of all exported coffee, to ensure their products meet the new standards as soon as possible in order to lift the reputation of Vietnamese coffee on world markets.

General secretary and deputy chair of the Vietnam Coffee and Cocoa Association, Dona Trieu Nhan, admitted the new standards needed to be applied as soon as possible, as the proportion of Vietnamese coffee rejected by international coffee exchanges was high.

The International Coffee Organisation has recently also put out an alert on the quality of Vietnamese coffee, announcing that the ratio of Vietnamese coffee rejected at London's Liffe Exchange during the 2006-07 economic year has risen 19% over the previous year. Up to 37,000 tonnes of Vietnamese coffee was rejected, the organisation said.

To overcome this, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development in mid-October passed a decision requiring coffee exporters to apply new quality standards to the current 2007-08 crop. Only coffee that meets the new standard will be cleared for export by customs.

However, insiders worried that the late issuance of a new standard would leave coffee producers and exporters with little room to manoeuvre as the current crop is already under harvest. Producers and exporters would lack time to change processes ranging from purchasing to processing and packaging, they said.

Only roughly 1 to 2% of the country's exported coffee currently meets the new standards.

Moreover, coffee exporters have already signed contracts with foreign partners to export roughly 200,000 tonnes of coffee based on the old quality standards.