The lack of enthusiasm among coffee growers in Vietnam’s Central Highlands for producing “clean” coffee is expected to be one of the key topics at the upcoming international conference on “Sustainable Coffee Production and Consumption,” scheduled to take place in Đắk Lắk.
This reluctance to embrace clean coffee production raises important questions not only for individual companies but for the entire coffee industry, as well as for government regulators and local authorities, about how to move forward with sustainable coffee development programs.
According to Nguyễn Kim Tú, Deputy General Director of Thái Hòa Lâm Đồng Coffee Company, organizing clean coffee production in Vietnam—and in Lâm Đồng province in particular—still faces many shortcomings. In less than two years, from late 2008 to August 2010, Thái Hòa Lâm Đồng managed to recruit around 5,000 farming households in Lâm Đồng—Vietnam’s second-largest coffee-growing region after Đắk Lắk—into its clean coffee production programs under the UTZ (UTZ Certified from the Netherlands) and 4C (Common Code for the Coffee Community) standards. The total area of coffee cultivated under these programs reached 9,000 hectares.
In a short period of farming under these two sets of standards, Lâm Đồng farmers produced 26,000 tons of 4C-certified coffee and 44,000 tons of UTZ-certified coffee. However, growers soon lost interest because the selling price of certified coffee was only slightly higher than that of regular coffee. One participating farmer said: “When we sell the product, the profit margin is barely higher than for ordinary coffee, yet the investment costs for clean coffee are significant. In the end, we suffer losses, so many farmers have voluntarily withdrawn from the program.”
In addition, not all farmers strictly followed the required processes, which led to inconsistent product quality. As a result, the rejection rate for Vietnamese coffee in general—and certified clean coffee in particular—on the international market is significantly higher than in other coffee-producing countries.
Despite these challenges, producing certified coffee that meets European and international standards remains an inevitable trend. According to the Lâm Đồng Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, the price of coffee in the province and across Vietnam for the 2010–2011 harvest season was expected to remain relatively stable and at acceptable levels, around 24,000–29,000 VND per kilogram.
This provides favorable conditions for the province to implement its clean coffee production program as part of its broader high-tech agricultural development strategy. The key issues now are how to raise farmers’ awareness that clean coffee production is an unavoidable global trend, and how to actively involve businesses so that, together with farmers, they can produce high-quality coffee that is competitive in price and quality with coffee from other countries.