Description

The project, “Partnering with trading companies to sustainably enhance smallholders’ livelihood in the Central Highlands of Vietnam through pilot chain interventions towards high-quality Robusta coffee”, has been designed as an add-on to the ACIAR funded V-SCOPE project. The V-SCOPE project aims at enhancing smallholder livelihoods in the Central Highlands of Viet Nam through improving the sustainability of coffee and black pepper farming systems and value chains. The value chain pilots that are the focus of this project are to complement the work under the V-SCOPE project. It provides more robust foundations for building scaling-up pathways for the changes and interventions experimented with in the current V-SCOPE project. The project is testing pathways to improve the current low profile coffee towards high-quality product segments through co-design and co-investment with coffee companies, and to derive and share innovative learnings from these. Building upon V-SCOPE existing work with Simexco, a more ambitious partnership has been built with this company Simexco that also includes its supplier - Ea Tan cooperative (Dak Lak); and a new partnership has been established with Vinh Hiep and its supplier - Glar cooperative (Gia Lai). Pilots have been designed together, building on and complementing private partners’ strategies. Interestingly, the two pilots feature different socio-economic backgrounds and coffee production levels: Ea Tan consists of prominent Kinh people with advanced high-quality coffee production, whereas all members of Glar cooperative are Ba Na ethnic group with lower processing and production understanding.