Myanmar
A five-year agriculture program supported with U.S. dollars recently ended with about 40,000 farmers showing improvement in production and expansion of export markets. Now, a new initiative begins to push those accomplishments even further.
The first program, funded with $27 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), supported the nation’s coffee growers as well as farmers of other crops, according to reports. The Myanmar Coffee Association and other groups now will push ahead with efforts to sustain production levels and find additional markets.
The United States will continue to finance the effort, giving $17 million a year as part of its Feed the Future Initiative.
Myanmar now has about 50,000 acres of coffee trees and about 80 percent of those trees are Arabica plants.
With coffee and other Myanmar agriculture products available in the United States, coffee exporters want to enter markets in Canada, Japan, Korea, and Europe.
“With the help of USAID for farming techniques, best practices, machinery, and quality control, we are now able to export coffee to the U.S. Myanmar coffee is now listed as one of the world’s best coffee brands. We can now arrange to export to European countries with the help of development agencies,” said U Myo Aye, chairman of Myanmar Coffee Association.
“Europe is a good export market for us while Japan and Korea are developed and populated countries with a high volume of coffee consumers. So, we are targeting these markets for further expansion,” he said.