Luc Ngan District of northern Bac Giang Province has been full of busy trading recently, with dry litchi leaves being the most sought-after products, rather than the locality’s nationally-popular tasty litchi fruits.

The dry leaves are sold to local traders hired by a company based in Hanoi, whose purpose in buying the leaves remains mysterious to both traders and farmers, Tien Phong newspaper reported.

For instance, Nguyen Dang Dao, one such trader, has been busily buying leaves from local farmers in Luc Ngan for the last month.

Dao said he has managed to buy as many as 100 tons of leaves, at a mere VND1,000 (US$0.05) a kilogram.

“Even people from the neighboring communes and districts have come to sell the leaves to me,” Dao said, adding that most of the sellers said they are willing to sell since it is no use keeping the dry leaves in their gardens.

Dao said he was hired by the Hanoi-based Lam Son Co Ltd to buy the leaves, with a simple requirement that the leaves must be clean and intact.

The company is run by Son, a former official in the provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, Dao added.

He said the company has granted him VND100 million to lease warehouses and pay local traders.

“The company has also provided me with packaging for packing the leaves,” he said.

“After packing, the leaves will be transported to a facility in Hanoi, before being exported to Japan.”

He added that the company is willing to buy whatever quantity is available.

“But I’m also concerned as to what exactly they will do with the dry litchi leaves,” Dao said.

Meanwhile, Nguyen Ba Duy, another litchi leaves trader in Luc Ngan District, said he has been buying the leaves for a women named Do Thi Thuy for the last few days.

“I buy at VND800-VND1,000 a kilogram and enjoy a commission of VND20 for each kilogram,” Duy said.

Hidden risks

Chu Van Bao, head of the Luc Ngan Chamber of Agriculture and Rural Development, said that if farmers rush to prune the litchi trees to collect a large amount of leaves to sell for larger profits, the trees’ blossoming process will be affected, and so will the crop’s productivity.

Luc Ngan produces the most litchi in the country, and it is also the main supply of the fruit to the Chinese market.

In the most recent crop, Bac Giang exported around 69,000 tons of litchis to China, 70 percent of which was sourced from Luc Ngan.

Some insiders have expressed concerns that the mass buying of litchi leaves will yield negative effects for local agricultural production, as in the previous cases of leeches and golden apple snails.

In such cases, Chinese traders would initially offer to buy leeches and golden apple snails at high prices and in large quantities, sending farmers scrambling to raise the pests.

But the traders simply “disappeared” once farmers had created a large supply of creatures.

Consequently, their crops have been destroyed by the very pests that they raised.

With traders now switching to buying litchi leaves en mass, local farmers are likely to chop down all their litchi trees to collect leaves, which has raised concerns in the agricultural sector.

“If farmers prune or cut down their litchi trees to get the leaves, it will seriously affect the productivity of the next crop,” an official from the Luc Ngan Chamber of Agriculture and Rural Development, warned.

Tuoitre