Climate change needs high quality coffee
by Thuan Sarzynski (Nhìn Tấn Thuận)
Coffee farmers in the North-West of Vietnam weighting the harvested coffee cherries to get paid.
I heard voices outside in the darkness of the night. People were dragging something on the ground. A quick look at my phone, it was 4 a.m. Still drunk, I fell back into slumber. Rain was drumming on the wooden roof.
In the morning, I realized farmers woke up at night to cover from the rain the coffee beans drying outside. Coffee cherries ripened early this year and harvest started in October. Farmers wet-processed the cherries and dried the hulled beans on their patio. The unusual rain was a problem as it slowed down coffee drying, reduced coffee quality, and increased farmers' work who had to ensure beans don’t get wet.
I started working in the province of Son La in the North-West of Vietnam two years ago when I started collecting data for my PhD on new coffee hybrids planted in the region. In Latin America where the hybrids were created, they produced more, and had better quality than commercial varieties. Also, they grew better and had more fruits in an agroforestry system than in full sun. These new hybrids are the hope of the whole coffee industry to adapt to climate change. The goal of my PhD was to test these coffee hybrids in agroforestry systems in Son La, a province in the North-West of Vietnam.
Tourists travelling in Vietnam often come for the magnificent landscape, exotic food, and friendly people. Among Vietnamese specialties, adventurous tourists often find Vietnamese coffee. Vietnamese coffee is poured in a stainless-steel filter where the dark liquid slowly drips down to a glass often filled with sweet, concentrated milk. Ice can be added to make the drink more refreshing in the local tropical weather. The languish waiting for the drips to fall down the glass as well as the sweet, bitter, and cold smack after the first sip make Vietnamese coffee very memorable.
Unfortunately this coffee, so appreciated by tourists, is often looked-down-upon by the coffee industry. Vietnamese coffee has a bad reputation because the country mostly grows coffee Robusta which is known for its bitterness, high caffeine content and bad taste.
The other coffee, coffee Arabica, has a good reputation in the coffee industry, but it represents a very small portion of the coffee grown in Vietnam. Still, the country could use a high-quality Arabica to improve the poor reputation of Vietnamese coffee.
The weather in Son La is so cold that some years can have frost. Unlike coffee Robusta which grows in the hot central highlands of Vietnam, the chill sub-tropical weather of the North-West suits coffee arabica very well. Yet, its quality is still not good. Catimor, the local coffee arabica variety, is famous for its resistance to pests and diseases, but not for its good quality. More importantly, farmers don’t care about quality, but about the weight of cherries and beans. They don’t know how to harvest and process coffee to harness all its quality potential.
This year coffee cherries are sold at 8000 Vietnam Dong (VND) per kg, that’s about 0.35 $. It’s more than last year thanks to the frost in Brazil which has burnt many coffee plantations there. The price can be a bit lower if the cherries are green and unripe, but in general farmers harvest enough ripe cherries for buyers to not notice the green cherries in the mix. A ripe coffee cherry is dark red, even a bit purple. Cherries sold by farmers are red, orange, yellowish, and more rarely green. The unripe cherries severely decrease the quality of the coffee.
Farmers harvest quickly and don’t let cherries over ripe, rot and dry on the branch. For the harvest, farmers usually call neighbours or relatives to help. When they hire people, they pay them 2000 VND per kg of harvested cherries which is about 0.08 $. A quick farmer gets almost one hundred kilos of cherries in a day and gets paid 8 $. The farmer wants to harvest quickly and doesn’t take the time to select only ripe cherries, this would take too much time and reduce his day wage.
From the agroforestry coffee plantations we planted in the BREEDCAFS project which funded my PhD thesis, the coffee cup quality was very good. Most samples received more than 80 points out of 100 and were eligible for the specialty market. Even the Catimor had good scores. The energy we put into harvesting ripe cherries and carefully processing them paid off. But most farmers are not as dedicated as we were.
The project promoted agroforestry and planted fruit trees along with the coffee seedlings. Farmers practicing agroforestry mostly grow fruit trees like mango, longan, and plum in their coffee plantations. Fruit trees bring them another income and protect the coffee against extreme heat and cold like frost. In 2019, frost burnt 3000 ha of coffee arabica in Son la, which is about 20% of the total coffee area in the province. The victims of this cold weather cut down their trees and need to wait 2 years for the trees to produce cherries again. During the night of the frost, the side of my experiment planted in full sun without shade trees completely burnt down, while the side under shade wasn’t damaged at all. Thanks to agroforestry, I am still able to do my PhD.
Helping farmers to grow fruit and shade trees could protect them against frost and future warm weather. Moreover, low levels of shade are known to increase coffee quality without reducing the yield. Agroforestry can also contribute to storing carbon to mitigate climate change and create habitat for biodiversity.
Convincing farmers to focus on coffee quality is not an easy task especially in Son La, the second poorest province of the country. Farmers don’t want to spend more time harvesting ripe cherries, they rarely want to invest in shade and fruit trees. Farmers also don’t want to buy coffee seedlings of new varieties which costs about 0.2 $ when they can replant the seeds of their coffee trees at no cost. It is an arduous task to make them change especially when they are not sure to receive a better pay later. The coffee traders and roasters I work with want more quality, and they are delighted to see the coffee in Son La can have high quality when properly harvested and processed; however, they don’t want to pay farmers more for the extra work. Increasing the price of coffee beans either means that customers in Europe and the US will pay a higher price, or that the company will reduce its profit. None of those options are attractive to traders and roasters so they don’t change the status-quo.
Mr. Hải, the farmer who is working with us on the project, likes the new coffee hybrids, “they are bigger, taller, and they have more fruits,” he shared enthusiastically. He is happy to have a higher yield but doesn’t care much about quality because there is no money in quality. His plantation is one of our demonstration plots where we compared the new coffee hybrids with the local Catimor, so this year again, we bought his coffee beans for twice the current market price. His wife, Ms. Thịnh was very motivated to harvest only ripe cherries for better quality.
I can’t help but ask myself what will happen to these high-quality coffee varieties once the project is over next year. There won’t be any funds to nudge farmers to harvest ripe cherries and make high quality beans. Again, they will harvest unripe cherries and sell them for a low price to any buyer.
At least, I hope that the new varieties we brought will produce more than the local variety and make them earn more money. I hope the shade and fruit trees we gave them will protect their coffee plantation against frost and other extreme weather linked with climate change.
I hope that next time I get drunk at their place, they will have a decent shower with hot water, a TV, and a cooking stove. I hope that at my next visit, their kids will have finished school, have gone to university and speak English to me. That’s all I hope for them.
Mr Hải digging a 1.5 m deep hole in his plantation for us to monitor soil humidity during the dry season.
About
Thuan Sarzynski (aka Nhìn Tấn Thuận), was born in Vietnam and raised in France. He writes about environmental issues and the human-nature interactions. Thuan has written about 400 posts on his personal blog, and other stories in online magazines. He holds a master degree in Landscape Ecology from the University of Hohenheim (Germany) and is currently studying a PhD about Vietnamese coffee adaptation to climate change at SupAgro Montpellier (France).