HANOI — At 1 am local time, while most of the village was still asleep, farmer Tran Van Bon was already in his lychee orchard in Vietnam's northern province of Bac Ninh, moving between rows of trees heavy with ripening fruit.
Working under the glow of headlamps, Bon and his family carefully picked bunches of bright red lychees before dawn, when the fruit is at its freshest.
A few hours later, the fruit would begin its journey to China, Vietnam's largest export market for lychees.
In late May, the first container trucks carrying lychees departed from Bac Ninh, bound for China, marking the start of this year's export season and bringing renewed hope to thousands of growers across the province.
Bac Ninh is Vietnam's largest lychee-producing province, with 29,800 hectares of orchards, according to the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Environment.
