STiR coffee and tea magazine

42 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 1, 2018 (February / March) T By Josh Doyle he coffee industry in Vietnam is an unquestionable success story. What began as a post-war state with a few coffee farms in the Central Highlands has ballooned into the second largest producer in the world. Vietnam now stands only behind Brazil in production, a country with 25 times more land than Vietnam. The question for Vietnam is whether that pace is sustainable. The country's focus on growing high volumes of robusta with the heavy use of chemical fertilizers has degraded the soil. Climate change threatens to reduce acreage suitable for growing arabica by up to 63% by 2050 due to a longer dry season, straining water supplies for farmers. Government and industry leaders are nonetheless determined to expand production and coffee processing throughout the country. A new emphasis on sustainable farming practices, improved yields, and greater focus on higher-earning arabica exports will help Vietnam maintain its position as a coffee producing powerhouse. Coffee was first planted in this narrow, mountainous land by French colonists in 1857, where it became a cash crop for small farms. It was discovered in the 1920s that Vietnam's Central Highlands were ideal for coffee cultivation, but it wasn't until after the Vietnam War, when the north and south reunited, that the area found its potential as a coffee producing giant. In the 1990s, the government encouraged migration to low- population areas in the Highlands, creating a work-force that would eventually form the backbone of the coffee industry. From 1986 to 2016, production in Vietnam rose from 18,400 tons to 1.76 million metric tons per year. Arabica on the rise Today less than 4% of the coffee harvest is arabica, the variety of bean used to make drip and pour-over coffee and to fill coffee capsules. Vietnam has been almost sin- gularly focused on growing the lower-quality robusta bean, carving out a niche as a provider of large quantities of cheap instant coffee. But this trend is changing, as the Vietnam intends to maintain its global position as the world's largest producer of robusta, increasing both acreage and yield, while transitioning several promising growing regions to arabica. Quantity Has a Quality All its Own Labor is relatively inexpensive with many Vietnamese growers operating smaller plots

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