Vietnam fresh produce export calendar

The natural harvest in Binh Thuan runs May to September and is the cheapest fruit of the year. The band drawn as peak is the other one: growers light the orchards at night from about October to flower the crop out of season, and that is the fruit the export programme into Hong Kong and mainland China is built on, running into the Lunar New Year weeks.

So the calendar reads backwards from most on this page. Availability is close to constant and the question is price, which turns on which crop is on the vessel rather than on whether there is one.

Roughly April to November, in volume from May, and staggered by region: the Mekong Delta orchards around Tien Giang and Ben Tre open it, and Dak Lak in the Central Highlands runs from about August and is now where the volume is.

That stagger is the whole reason a Hong Kong buyer works this lane and the Thai one. Vietnam peaks after Thailand has finished, so between them the two origins cover most of the year — and in the months where they overlap, the market has a choice it does not have in either shoulder.

Roughly June to October, out of Hung Yen in the north and the Mekong Delta in the south. It sits directly on top of Thailand’s main crop, which is why longan is the softest-priced thing on either lane in July and August.

It is a fruit that browns rather than rots: the shell darkens within days of harvest and the flesh can still be perfect underneath. Buyers price on appearance, so the days lost at a terminal cost more here than the condition of the cargo suggests.

Year-round. The Thai super-early varieties planted through the Mekong Delta for export fruit continuously, so there is no window to plan around and no month when the crop is unavailable.

What moves instead is demand, almost all of it Chinese, and it moves faster than any harvest would. A jackfruit programme is priced week by week, and the thing worth watching is what else is on the vessel: in durian peak, space is the constraint on a crop that has none of its own.