contribute over 60 percent of Vietnam’s export of robusta, the category of coffee in which Vietnam rules the world market.

He said he wanted to turn coffee production into the trade mark and tourist attraction of the province and of Vietnam as a whole. But his initiative’s first target was to increase and standardize coffee quality in Vietnam and improve farmers’ living standard.

The “Coffee Paradise” would become a place where coffee lovers worldwide could find everything related to coffee, Nguyen Vu told Thanh Nien. There would be a coffee museum, a coffee research institute, and every kind coffee and coffee shop imaginable.

Coffee pilgrims visiting Buon Ma Thuot can also relax at a resort complex where they would be refreshed by Vietnamese traditional medicinal secrets, take part in coffee production phases, and explore the mountains.
Nguyen Vu hoped that his ambitious initiative would lead to a boom of visitors to the Central Highlands, thus promote economic development of the area and, ultimately, of Vietnam.

Quality first.

While talking to Thanh Nien, Nguyen Vu pointed out the fact that, though Vietnam was the world’s No 2 leader in exporting coffee after Brazil, it was earning little while many other countries that grew no coffee were enjoying the impressively high added value from selling coffee.

The reason, according to him, was Vietnam’s backwardness in both techniques and practice of cultivation, purchase, process and trade of coffee.
Vietnam did not apply international standards on coffee quality control and existing regulations did not require traders to have their coffee undergo quality control tests prior to export, Nguyen Vu added.

Therefore, Vietnamese traders were selling poor-quality coffee at cheap prices all over the world – which led to a shameful statistic – of 1.5 million bags of imported coffee rejected by the European market during 2005-2006, one million were from Vietnam, according to a report by the Vietnam Coffee and Cocoa Association.

“Columbia is not a leading coffee exporter, but its coffee quality is number one. The lesson from Columbia is about establishing a national trade mark. The standard sample of robusta coffee from Buon Ma Thuot is considered the world’s best, but unfortunately, this is not uniform throughout growing areas in Vietnam,” Nguyen Vu said.

Vu said the utmost target of his “Coffee Paradise” initiative was to promote the world’s best national coffee brand name. A Common Code for the Coffee Community would be established as the foundation for a sustainable coffee industry.

Advanced technologies and modern management methods would be applied to all phases of production, including variety selection, growing, harvesting, processing, branding, logistics, and distribution.

If all of that could be achieved, the coffee products would be more competitive, farmers’ income increase, and enterprises’ profits rise, Nguyen Vu said.

He also dreamed up a “bourse” of coffee and other valuable produces for farmers from developing countries. It would be formed based on the agreement and commitment for common benefits between those coffee growing countries, including Vietnam, Brazil, and Indonesia, and such countries as Japan or Singapore, which have strong financial and logistic capacity. It would be different from those existing coffee exchanges in New York or London, which mostly protected the benefits of the developed countries, Nguyen Vu said.

National project

The leaders of Dak Lak province have been very interested in the idea of a coffee paradise on their home field. In a résumé of a working session last December, the provincial People’s Committee “thanks and deeply appreciates Trung Nguyen for its idea of and contribution to establishing the Buon Ma Thuot coffee trade mark. The initiative of a ‘Buon Ma Thuot Coffee Paradise’ is very impressive and the People’s Committee hopes it will be realized because it meets the needs of all coffee growers in Dak Lak. The People’s Committee will strongly support and assist the initiative… Trung Nguyen Company is the leading force to carry out the work.”

Nguyen Vu said, the “coffee paradise” was not a project of Trung Nguyen but a national one on a global scale – it could also be a world project. It would require the participation of multiple sectors and administrative agencies of all levels. Many leading foreign experts in related fields had conducted studies and joined in this gigantic project.

He also said that many things had to be done in order to realize the idea soon. First there had to be a zoning master plan for Buon Ma Thuot which would center on coffee growing. Then there would be a model project for 3,000 hectares of coffee, as well as other scientific, cultural, and projects to prevent speculation or stockpiling of coffee products.

Outbrewing Starbucks.

“Trung Nguyen’s success at home in Vietnam parallels the Starbucks experience in the United States (except it dominated its home country in just 4 years, while Starbucks took 15),” an MBA paper at the Columbia Business School said in 1994.

Trung Nguyen fetches Vietnamese some 6 million cups of coffee everyday and controls a third of the instant coffee market. It is also, step by step, promoting its brands in the US, France, Singapore and Japan.

It is said that a grain of coffee, on its way from the farm to the supermarket, appreciates up to 40 times and the added value all goes to the traders. But according to the afore-mentioned MBA paper, “While Starbucks is criticized for profiting off of poor farmers in developing countries, Trung Nguyen is itself from a developing country and has cultivated relationships with growers by paying them higher prices than government-owned exporters.”

It is safe to say that Trung Nguyen is a product of the ongoing reform in Vietnam and part of the country’s cherished capital in its global integration. There are many ways more to understand the socialist orientation, and Trung Nguyen shows one of them – committing its development to that of farmers’.

Theo www.daktra.com.vn