Daw Sandar, of Marga Mushrooms in North Dagon, with examples from her latest harvest. Pic: Aung Sithu Hein

MUSHROOM farmers in Myanmar should focus on seeking international markets rather than selling them domestically, a number of producers said last week.

Daw Hla Ohnmar Khin, a mushroom grower, said there is an excellent opportunity to sell Myanmar’s mushrooms abroad, especially the Shiitake and Monkey Head varieties, which are already popular in other countries, she said.

Even though mushrooms with medicinal properties, like the Linzxeu type, have been exported as value-added products since 1997, producers of the edible varieties have not yet taken the same steps, Daw Hla Ohnmar Khin said.

“After 1997, many restaurants started putting edible mushrooms in their rice and salad dishes and they have become quite popular locally.

“Some producers do grow, dry and then export their Oyster and Monkey Head mushrooms in whatever quantities they can but it’s certainly not on a large scale yet,” said Daw Soe Soe Thin, the assistant manager of Myanma Plantation Crops and Farms Enterprise.

Daw Hla Ohnmar Khin said one issue is the difficulty of transporting mushrooms from one place to another. She said that although commodity importers in Japan and Singapore began offering to buy edible mushrooms from Myanmar 11 years ago, the practice remains rare because they are difficult to transport.

“Oyster mushrooms are extremely delicate and can either be bruised or broken when transported – even within the shop – which reduces their value. That means that if we export them raw then we won’t get the best prices for them,” she added.

To get better prices, producers must value-add by canning them or preparing them for direct sale abroad, she said. Unfortunately, value-adding anything, including mushrooms, requires significant expenditure because sophisticated packaging machines are required.

For many within the industry, the cost of those machines is simply out of reach.
“The majority of our mushrooms are grown and then left to dry naturally before they are sold. It’s relatively cheap to do this compared to adding value to them – like canning them for sale abroad. If we want to do this, we’ve got to buy the machinery to do so,” said Daw Hla Ohnmar Khin.

Another value-adding method Daw Hla Ohnmar Khin suggested is pickling.
“Mushroom can definitely be pickled and I’ve seen them added to foods like rice porridge. I think this is definitely a market that we can tap into overseas,” she said.

She added that a number of markets in Asia, including Japan and China, are also warming to steamed mushrooms, which is another potential value-added sector that Myanmar’s producers could tap into.

But those producers who spoke to The Myanmar Times agreed that breaking into these developing markets will require money and government assistance.
Daw Sandar, the owner of Marga Mushrooms in North Dagon, said the first step should be to increase the number of wholesale centres and ensure that producers get good prices for their mushrooms.

“We know that when we sell our mushrooms to distributors during our peak growing season – monsoon and winter – we’re getting rates below the market price but we don’t have any choice. But if we could wholesale them directly we’d get better prices,” she added.

Other internationally popular mushrooms grown in Myanmar are the Black Jelly and Straw varieties.