Vietnam and the Asian Development Bank help smallholder coffee farmers weather the vagaries of climate change.
Vietnamese coffee farmers stand to benefit from plans by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to help smallholder coffee farmers in India, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea, as well as Vietnam, adapt to climate change by providing a loan of up to $100 million to ECOM Agroindustrial Corp Ltd and ECOM Agroindustrial Asia Private Limited. The funds will be used as permanent working capital, including inventories, receivables, and advances to smallholder farmers for sustainable coffee procurement, as well as operating expenses for extension services, training, advisory support, research and development, and pilot sustainability projects. By providing these funds, ADB aims to enhance the sector’s climate resilience and provide long-term support to smallholder coffee farmers.
This framework includes a tender from ADB with a budget of $490,000 for Vietnamese coffee consulting firms. The firms will provide technical assistance to an estimated 1,000 smallholder coffee farmers in the country (including at least 400 female farmers). Vietnam has an estimated 1.4 million smallholder farmers responsible for about 85% of the country’s coffee output.
Proposed projects specific to Vietnam include replanting coffee farms with more climate-resilient varieties, introducing diverse agroforestry systems managed with regenerative agricultural practices, and developing three advanced coffee demonstration farms that focus on sustainable methods in the Central Highlands, which are prone to drought and heatwaves. The framework will be implemented over the next three years, beginning this September.
The initiative includes trainings, workshops, and demonstrations that will be offered to all farmers from communities where ECOM sources coffee, and other growers as well. It will support the advancement of gender equality by increasing women’s economic participation in agriculture, seeking to enhance their influence on farm-level decision-making, and improving their financial and technical capabilities.
Notably, training programs will involve multiple contacts per year throughout the final 24 months of the project with participating farmers. The following key topics will be covered:
- Climate change and potential impacts on coffee farmers
- Replanting for climate resilience
- Soil health management to enhance climate resilience, with a focus on introducing intercropping with nitrogen-fixing cover crops
- Highly diversified agroforestry systems
- Improving farm profitability to improve climate resilience
Demonstration field locations (selected in cooperation with ECOM) will be focused on areas where climate change-related droughts and heatwaves are becoming more prevalent. Training farms will demonstrate:
- Replanting with climate-resilient coffee varieties using shade-grown systems
- Diverse, multitiered agroforestry systems utilizing small livestock
- Impacts of different plant care regimes
- Use of leguminous and other cover crops, biochar, and other soil amendments
Research at the demonstration farms will examine the impact of drought, heatwaves, and other relevant climate-related stressors on plants, as well as the ability of different coffee-growing systems to withstand these stressors. Automatic weather stations and other climate tools (e.g., data loggers), along with biodiversity trackers, will be necessary to assess the impact.
ADB is also partnering with the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Environment on key projects that focus on the sustainable transformation of the rice sector, ecosystem conservation, and environmental quality improvement.