After years of fluctuating expansion, Vietnam’s coffee area has now stabilized at about 500,000 hectares. In 2005 the country exported 803,647 tons of coffee at an average price of USD 789.2/ton, earning USD 634.2 million.
During the first six months of 2006, Vietnam exported 425,073 tons of coffee—down 6 percent from the same period a year earlier—but export revenue rose 40 percent to USD 470.9 million thanks mainly to higher world prices, not to any significant improvement in product quality.
In fact, low-quality coffee from Vietnam accounted for 78 percent of all coffee rejected worldwide in 2004 (about 2.57 million bags), and by 2005 the share of rejected Vietnamese Robusta had climbed to 89 percent (around 1.65 million bags). From October 2005 to March 2006, 88 percent of Vietnamese coffee exports were rejected—19 percent more than the previous year.
A key reason is poor harvesting practices: mixing ripe cherries with unripe, overripe, or dry fallen fruit, which undermines processing. Most Robusta is still processed by the dry method; wet processing is rare. Cherries are often dried whole without enough space, in thick piles or directly on bare ground, and sometimes not dried immediately. The result is uneven drying, mold growth, and excessive impurities.
Experts warn that in the 2006–2007 crop year, exporters and coffee growers must stop stripping branches and collecting green or shriveled cherries. The industry standard 10 TCN 100–88 requires fresh, fully ripe cherries. Under current conditions, harvesting should begin only when at least 80 percent of Robusta cherries are ripe if processed by the dry method, and at least 95 percent of Arabica cherries are ripe if processed by the wet method.
These requirements are not easy to enforce. The price difference between mixed green/ripe cherries and fully ripe cherries is small, labor and processing costs are lower when stripping entire branches, and the yield of beans per kilogram of fresh fruit may appear equal or higher—tempting farmers to continue the old practice. Yet harvesting green cherries reduces total output: every year hundreds of thousands of tons of exportable beans—worth hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars—are lost because of unripe picking.
To raise the quality of fresh cherries and green coffee beans, Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Diệp Kỉnh Tần has directed provincial agriculture departments to educate farmers and companies to follow intensive cultivation and harvest only ripe cherries in line with standard 10 TCN 100–88 issued by the Department of Agro-Forestry Product Processing and Salt Production. Each province should build one or two pilot models for ripe-cherry harvesting in cooperation with exporters, farmers, local authorities, and scientists.
Deputy Minister Tần also emphasized the need for sustainable intensive farming and for ending the branch-stripping habit. Export companies should firmly refuse to buy green cherries. Only by doing so can Vietnamese coffee hope to compete confidently in global markets.