Growing pains for Vietnam's world-leading coffee and pepper crops

Determined their impoverished small farmers are not left behind, the region's fast developing economies have seized on surprise new plantings of coffee and black pepper which have done just that.

Our government's Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research has been working in Vietnam since 1993 on supporting these farmers, called smallholders.

Now the centre is partnering with Vietnamese researchers to solve the many problems these new crops are experiencing, particularly in the country's Central Highlands where they directly and indirectly, support more than a million livelihoods.

The world's coffee plantings revolve around high-end Arabica and the lesser Robusta.

Vietnam today produces around 40 per cent of the world's Robusta coffee which is mostly used in blend or to produce instant coffee in the low-end market.

Research programs, supported by the Australian government, are today trying to increase the world's appetite for premium quality Robusta.

Vietnam is also the world's biggest supplier of pepper.

But both coffee and black pepper crops in the Central Highlands have "drastically deteriorated" in recent years and plants "have been dying in significant numbers".

They are grown in the same regions and often on the same farm.

The unmanaged expansion of coffee and pepper has resulted in deforestation along with farmers establishing production areas on what is considered unsuitable land.

Coupled with this are management issues involving the misuse and overuse of mineral fertilisers, irrigation and synthetic pesticides.

There has been an increasing incidence of soil-borne pests and diseases, further driving the trend for additional inputs and aggravating negative impacts on the environment.

So the research has shifted to sustainability of these boom new crops which target volume rather than quality.

French-born Dr Estelle Bienabe has been working in Vietnam for five years to help with the country's sustainable development issues.

She also points to a little understood problem with the smallholders facing farm labor issues with the drift of younger people to city areas.

Dr Bienabe said farm focus groups had been established across the Central Highlands to better explain to smallholders the benefits of better soil management techniques.

She said the marketing and promotion of the country's "green" premium Robusta blends would ultimately result in higher returns for growers.