Coffee frontiers in the central highlands of vietnam networks of connectivity

Keywords: Precipitate peasants; pioneer front; coffee; actor-networks; `local-periphery’ Quite often, the colonisation of frontier lands for agriculture is mediated by the expansion of

Coffee frontiers in the Central Highlands of Vietnam: networks of connectivity

Stan B-H Tan

Abstract: The objective of this paper is to provide an understanding

of how the gap between the `global’ and the `local-peripheral’ is bridged in the everyday life of the peasantry at a coffee pioneer front The networks of connectivity between the spontaneous migrant-peasants at the coffee pioneer front in the province of Dak Lak in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, and the global coffee market are explored This set of linkages helps the peasantry to settle, despite the harsh conditions of life on the frontier This is illustrated through a brief ethnographic account of the `peripheral’ characteristics of life on a coffee pioneer front By borrowing analytical tools from actor-network theory, the paper also illuminates the (actor) networks through which coffee finally reaches the export gate This account suggests that global commodity production processes are often embedded in local dynamics, in this case, the political-economy of the frontier Further, it implies the need to transcend scales when inquiring about peasant-market relationships in export agro-commodity production.

Keywords: Precipitate peasants; pioneer front; coffee;

actor-networks; `local-periphery’

Quite often, the colonisation of frontier lands for agriculture is mediated by the expansion of export agro-commodity production Coffee cultivation in particular has played this role in many parts of the world (Roseberry, 1995: 3–10; Dean, 1995: 178–90) This is premised on the condition that peasants1on the frontier are connected to the export market, either as a result of the development of market institutions – ‘capitalism’s calling up of the peasantry’ (Roseberry, 1983: 207) – or through the peasants’ own initiation (Yarrington, 1997) In either case, pioneer fronts become a new productive space for the global market Although situated at the periphery of the national political-ISSN: 1360-7456, pp51–67

Author: Stan B-H Tan, Southeast Asian Studies Programme, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, 10 Kent Ridge Cres., Singapore 119260 E-mail: bhstan@mbox2.singnet.com.sg

economic spatial framework, the frontier, in this sense, is also most directly connected to the global economy This paper attempts to examine how such a spatial disjuncture is resolved on a coffee pioneer front in Dak Lak, Vietnam (see Figure 1) I will argue that this bridging of the two extremes is essentially

a contestation between global production processes and local dynamics I will illustrate this ‘global connection’ by presenting a montage of stories from the peasantry’s everyday life on a coffee pioneer front in Dak Lak, Vietnam

A COFFEE PIONEER FRONT

About four years ago, Mr Ca arrived in this part of Dak Lak, an area demarcated by the Ea H’leo district forestry office as Sector 1075b, in the middle of a moonless and starless night He and his family had alighted off the bus at point 67 km of National Highway 14 Slowly, they traversed along the dirt path running through Dlieya commune, Krong Nang district When Ca and his family finally crossed the stream demarcating the boundary of 1075B and Dlieya, Ca knew he had arrived at the plot of land he had bought a year before;2 even though it was still surrounded by forests back then One night, when I asked about his feelings upon arrival, Ca gazed at the starry night sky and recalled the darkness of that fateful, moonless night in the wilderness that welcomed him to his new home In the dark, Ca could not even see his own hands stretched out in front of him, but ironically, migrating here was supposed

to bring him and his family a better life A tinge of regret consumed him

momentarily He compared that initial gloom and darkness to that of Chi Dau.

This refers to the extreme despair and gloominess of rural life portrayed in the

classic novel Tat Den (To, 1939).3That night, he drank as much rice wine as he could to make the darkness a little bit ‘friendlier’ He and his family persevered and stayed on Their purpose: to plant coffee

Migrants to Dak Lak have heard and seen for themselves what a life with

‘coffee’ means For Ca, the sky at night is less ‘gloomy’ today not because the forest has been cleared or there are more stars, but rather the first harvest of the

‘golden bean’ has affirmed his hopes; for others, they believe it will.4 The social availability of land on the Dak Lak frontier is such that the migrants can

‘instantly’ convert it into abundant production of export coffee – seeking what Dean (1995: 40) terms the Webb (1931) ‘frontier windfall’ This is clearly demonstrated by the engravings found at a makeshift and nameless burial site

of a recently deceased Nung man in Sector 1075b, ‘I came to plant gold, have yet to get the gold, but at least have a piece of land to bury one’s body’.5

Today, Sector 1075b (later renamed Thon 96 by the State7) is a vast landscape of coffee trees dotted with wooden thatched houses and surrounded

by tracts of surviving forests It is essentially a new settlement created by precipitate peasants8 on frontier land through the clearing of forests with the specific purpose of cultivating cash crops, in this case coffee, for the export economy (Clarence-Smith and Ruf, 1996)

The initially tough conditions of life at the pioneer fronts are a common denominator across the different migrant groups, whether state-organised or

Laos Thailand

Viet Nam

DAK LAK

Buon Me Thuot

Da Lat

Ho Chi Minh City

Hanoi

Source: Prepared on request by the Department of Agriculture and Rural

Development, Dak Lak Province, Vietnam, 1999

Figure 1 Dak Lak Province

spontaneous,9 into the Central Highlands or Tay Nguyen of Vietnam (Hardy, 1998) The most recent wave of colonisation of Tay Nguyen, by Kinh and non-autochthonous ethnic groups, has been pervasively mediated by the attraction

of participating in the export agro-commodity economy, especially coffee

production (Evans, 1992; Hung, 1998) This Tay Tien (Western March),10into Tay Nguyen since the mid-1980s can be attributed to the transformation of the

agrarian regime and political-economic reforms subsumed under the term Doi Moi (De Koninck, 1996, 1999) Indeed, the territorial and productive expansion

of coffee is closely intertwined with demographic transitions in Dak Lak province A correlation between Table 1 concerning the expansion of coffee lands, and Table 2 concerning the estimation of migrants to Dak Lak, reveals this close interaction While Vietnam’s rather ‘smooth’ transition towards a market-driven economy has been attributed to the inherent domestic dynamics within a central planning fac¸ade, market institutions are still ill-equipped for efficient integration into the wider capitalist economy (Fforde and De Vylder, 1996) The phenomenal rise of coffee at the Dak Lak frontier, supposedly physically isolated and infrastructurally deficient, is therefore all the more fascinating

COFFEE: A GLOBAL COMMODITY

From its inception, coffee as commodity has always been globally organised (Talbot, 1995–6: 113) Coffee cultivation is restricted to the tropics and invariably also developing countries, due to the organic demands of the coffee tree, while its consumption is concentrated in the developed countries (Stewart, 1992) The global coffee market is a rich and complex regime, and trade is generally conducted in the form of the green coffee bean This market is dictated by a discourse on quality, which is reflected by the plethora of terminology on coffee quality used in the trade.11 Pendergrast (1999) has documented how this quality discourse was constructed in the last two hundred years by the various actors in the trade This discourse is perhaps epitomised best by the marketing advertisement creation of the fictional Juan Valdez, the Columbia coffee grower, who throughout time has refused to compromise on the quality of coffee he grows (Pendergrast, 1999)

Although robusta beans, which Vietnam mainly produces, are used primarily for blending with the arabica beans to be processed into soluble coffee,12 the trading of robusta coffee is nevertheless conducted strictly according to the quality of the green coffee bean (Marshall, 1985).13Depending on the tightness

of the coffee network, a compromise on quality dictated by the consuming end may occur along any chain of the network, from cultivating to roasting (Schultz, and Yang, 1997: 171)

Coffee is thus a commodity by destination, that is ‘object[s] intended by their producers principally for exchange’ (Appadurai, 1986: 16) Moreover, coffee has evolved from a commodity defined by ‘exclusivity’, when the acquisition of the object itself is considered valuable, to one underlined by

‘authenticity’, when it is subjected to a set of constructed evaluation criteria, in

this case, quality of the coffee bean (Appadurai, 1986: 44–56) Indeed, black broken beans, or the 3 ‘B’ beans find almost no buyer in the market (McClumpha, 1988: 11) This demands that peasants be initiated, to a certain extent, to the production process and demands of the commodity regime However, coffee is often a foreign crop and one risks over-generalising in assuming that every peasant knows the art of its cultivation, much more that they appreciate what it takes to meet the demands of the delicate trade This is clearly illustrated by coffee pioneers’ malpractices on the frontier in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest region (Dean, 1995: 181–9)

A frontier marks the marginal/peripheral settlement zone of an ‘advancing’ population (Turner, 1920) Dean (1995: 40) argues that a frontier is a physical

Table 1 Expansion of Dak Lak Coffee Area (Hectares) in the Last Twenty Years*+

(e.g maize, beans, upland rice)

(e.g paddy)

* This is based on the calculation of land-use change and vegetation in the Serepok Basin, which includes the whole of Dak Lak Province and Lam Ha and Lac Duong districts of Lam Dong Province.

+ This land survey was carried out by COWI-Kruger Consultancy under the sponsorships of the Danish International Development Assistance (DANIDA) and the Mekong River Commission (MRC) As the methodology used is different from the Statistical Offices, and that it also covers two districts from Lam Dong Province, the data illustrated here is different from the standard statistical office data.

Source: MRC/DANIDA, 1996.

Table 2 Estimations of Migration to Dak Lak*

Planned Migration Spontaneous Migration Households Persons Households Persons

(Post-Unification)

(Contract 100 system)

(Doi Moi)

* These should be taken as estimates, as the Department for Fixed Cultivation and Sedentarization could

not track down all those who came with the state’s New Economic Zone policies but left after that More conspicuously, the state agencies cannot accurately calculate the number of spontaneous migrants who came and settled in Dak Lak.

Source: Hung, 1998.

reality that ‘is most concretely, materialistically, and parsimoniously conceived

as a relatively undisturbed ecosystem, one which exhibits a high potential for exploitation by the invading group’ Hence, it can be considered as supposedly the most isolated zone, physically and institutionally, from the spatial realms of the global market On the same note, Sikor (1995) points out that poor market access due to the physical terrain and lack of infrastructural supports, stands as

an important challenge to the development of industrial crop production in the Tay Nguyen Conceptualising this into the global agro-commodity framework, coffee pioneer fronts are therefore at once local/peripheral and global How is this disjuncture, or ‘gap’, between the global and the local bridged?

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AGRO-FOOD AND

ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY

In an era of widespread trends in the industrial organisation of agriculture, Kearney (1996: 127–30) argues that it is necessary to add a fifth domain, agro-industrialisation, to Wolf’s (1966) analysis of how peasants are incorporated into the wider contexts The literature on the international political economy of agro-food represents the main set of tools to study this global connection of the peasantry.14Political-economic approaches, in this case, would assume that the complicated discourse on coffee quality is well translated across space to the various actors Fine (1994) argues that the intrinsic organic characteristic of food has implications across the entire commodity chain articulated in terms of quality and value This is such that ‘systems analysis cannot explain the social terms and definitions of the production and valuation of food’ (Arce and Marsden, 1993: 308–9) Moreover, conventional approaches fail to account for the social practice of agriculture when utilising industrial restructuring analytical tools to study agro-food systems (Goodman and Watts, 1994) Agriculture becomes merely another chain along the ‘production conveyor belt’ At times, coffee arrives at the ‘market’ in simple ways overlooked by broad scale approaches such as the commodity chain and regulation theories The social practice of agriculture is thus such that global food production processes are embedded in local, everyday practices at times apparently irrelevant to the commodity regime (Arce and Marsden, 1995)

It is common to find that in these analyses, ‘globalization is animated as a political project of world economic management orchestrated by a regime of capitalist institutions including transnational corporations, financial institutions and regulatory infrastructures’ (Whatmore and Thorne, 1997: 287) The tendency is to provide a ‘macro’ account of change by some external abstract forces, for example globalisation, in which the ‘micro’ level is ultimately

‘pulled into place’ (Murdoch, 1995: 738) In the process, corporate actors such

as transnational corporations, the State or multilateral institutions are reified and people disappear from the analyses (Busch and Juska, 1997; Whatmore and Thorne, 1997) The very protagonists of agriculture, peasants, become merely pawns in the ‘big game’ of the corporate actors and doomed to subordination by capital and the State We need to ‘unpack’ the globalisation

tendencies and the accompanying shortcomings outlined above in order to make sense of how export agro-commodity processes are played out locally I propose to incorporate actor network theory to help illuminate how networks connecting the frontier peasants to the global coffee market are embedded within local dynamics This requires us to describe networks of relationships as fully as possible by following the actors as they weave them together

MONTAGE OF A JOURNEY: COFFEE, TRAVERSING THE

EXTREMES

Cultivating coffee

When Mr Van, an ethnic Nung elder, first decided to migrate to Tay Nguyen to get involved in the coffee economy, he did not know how to cultivate a coffee tree According to Van, the key to learning the trade was to ‘ask and observe those who came earlier’:15‘For example, on a day you see people cultivating in

a certain manner, then you go back and try it out yourself’ (Interview, 1999,

Thon 9, Ea Hiao Commune) Mr Tam, a settler from Ha Bac, reaffirmed this

principle He added that the trick was to ask a diverse group of people because

‘each has his own way (moi nguoi moi cach), and some people tell you the truth, some people do not’ (Interview, 1999, Thon 9, Ea Hiao Commune).

Van bought the first batch of seedlings from a Mr Sang in Ea Toh commune

after asking around among anh em (brothers and sisters) who had arrived

earlier He managed to plant some 700 coffee trees For the second planting, he

bought the seeds from the Vien Eak Mat (Institute of Coffee Research) Most

first-time cultivators have no idea what type of coffee they are planting, nor what type of seeds they are using The cultivation process begins with selecting the seeds and sowing the seeds into seedlings As Mrs Hanh describes:

First, you immerse the seeds into a basin of water and then discard the seeds that float up; those that stay sunken are kept After five-six days, I remove the pulp of the coffee seeds and sow the seeds into seedlings A month later, the seedlings are transplanted into cylindrical bamboo containers Seedlings that bent are not transplanted into the cylindrical bamboo containers The following month, the

seedlings are ready to be planted (Interview, 1999, Thon 9, Ea Hiao Commune).

To survive the initial three to four years before the first harvest, Mr Van cultivated rice, corn and other crops for both household consumption and the

market He and others call this ‘lay ngan nuoi dai’ (using the short term crops

to invest in the long term crops) Upland rice, bean crops and a variety of household horticultures providing at least one harvest per year, starting from the first, supplied the peasants with the necessary calories while awaiting the first coffee harvest to provide the major income Cultivating food crops, or selling their labour, represent ways the peasants try to survive at the frontier

and maintain their coffee trees simultaneously ‘Lay ngan nuoi dai’ is the

recipe to surviving the coffee frontier

The coffee trees come of age

During the school vacation, the ten year old Lien, Anh Luan’s eldest daughter, would put on her mother’s conical hat and walk down the rows of coffee trees early in the morning She would pick the bright red coffee cherries from among the green ones on the branches (Field Notes, July 1999).

In Vietnam, fresh coffee cherries are generally processed on-farm using the dry method.16 Although this method does not require much capital investment at all, it demands the cultivator/processor’s personal attention During the non-harvest season, the coffee cherries are laid on the bare ground to dry in the sun When the external layer turns darkish and the beans rattle inside the shell when shaken, the dried coffee cherries are packed into used fertiliser bags Once a significant quantity has been accumulated, for example a full bag, the peasants may sell it immediately or keep it for emergency purposes During the main harvest, the peasants will have to harvest a large quantity of ripe coffee cherries within a relatively short period of about eight weeks so that the coffee cherries

do not become over-ripe It is not certain, however, whether the peasants harvest only the red coffee cherries during the main harvesting season due to the amount they are dealing with, since they may not have close supervision over the harvesting process

Coffee transactions

Peasants short on capital usually sell their main harvest as fresh coffee cherries, most of them having already ‘mortgaged’ the harvests when they undertook the advanced credits (in cash or fertilisers) from the traders Most of the peasants

in Thon 9 sell their coffee to the traders in Cho Bai Bang Mr Hung (a coffee

trader there) purchases both dried and fresh coffee cherries and pays accordingly He is a major source of credit to many peasant households in

Thon 9 Coffee cherries arrive at the ‘market’ by a range of possible ways, as

described in the following two paragraphs

It was the morning of the wedding between Mr Thinh’s eldest son and Mr Van’s third daughter Balancing two small bags on a bamboo pole hung over the shoulder, Mr Mung walked past Ca’s house He turned around and asked

Ca ‘What is the price of ca tuoi17at Bai Bang today?’ Cutting a forlorn figure

in the morning mist, Mung was walking down the slope towards Cho Bai Bang

to sell the two small bags of fresh coffee cherries to raise the token sum of money to attend the wedding (Field Notes, July 1999).18

Under the blazing morning sun, one of the women was peddling the bicycle while the other was running behind, trying her best to balance the two bags of coffee they were transporting The coffee was stored in used fertiliser bags As they arrived at Hung’s storehouse in Cho Bai Bang, Hung’s wife went out to meet them She looked into the bigger bag and grabbed a handful of the fresh coffee cherries to inspect the colour Satisfied, she proceeded to weigh the whole bag on a rusty mechanical scale She then took another sample from the

bag of dried coffee cherries, gave a bite to a few cherries, presumably to test the moisture content The women were then paid for their produce and given two empty fertiliser bags for the ones they left behind (Field Notes, July 1999) Hung would pay a lower price if he felt that the moisture content was too high, determined by ‘a muffled rattle’, or decided that the fresh cherry was too

‘green’ Come the main harvesting season, Hung would set up procurement stations near the coffee sectors of his clients for more efficient logistics

Alternatively, he would drive his xe-cay (handheld tractor)19 to each client’s house, or peasants who ‘owed’ him credits, to collect the goods if the quantity was large He would dry the fresh coffee cherries in his own compound, then de-pulp the dried coffee cherries to get the coffee beans in the fruit using a simple de-pulping machine that runs on a tractor engine The unsorted green coffee beans were then sold to bigger scale traders or export processors Hung

would transport the coffee on his xe cay to the traders if the quantity was small Through Hung, a significant amount of the coffee from Thon 9 reaches Truc Tam Enterprise in Buon Ho Town Its owner, Mrs Tam, was adamant that her

facility not accept poor quality produce, for example dried coffee cherries that appeared mouldy and had a fermented smell; alternatively, she may pay a very

low price for those goods At Truc Tam, the dried coffee cherries are de-pulped

by machines The coffee beans are then sorted into different quality grades by

an elaborate system of machinery For example, ‘Robusta Grade One Screen 16’ refers to beans of the size that fits the sieve-screen number sixteen The

coffee processed at Truc Tam is usually exported through companies that possess a coffee export licence; Hiep Phuc is one of these.

Certified and on the road

Hiep Phuc Export Trade and Tourism Company is based in Buon Ma Thuot city, the capital of Dak Lak Hiep Phuc is situated right at the

production-export interface of the coffee network Deals with foreign coffee buyers, such

as Neumann Gruppe, Taloca and Volcafe are usually settled via facsimile and

telephone communication The buying party specifies the quality of the coffee: the grade category; moisture content; or even the smell of the beans, and so on The quality control agencies then inspect the coffee at the facilities of the

export processing companies, such as Hiep Phuc or Truc Tam.20

The foreign buyers decide on the quality control agencies which are to inspect the coffee There are basically two coffee quality control agencies in

Vietnam, Cafecontrol of VinaCafe, and Food Commodity Control-Omit.

Without the certification of either agency, no coffee can be exported out of Vietnam, and no buyers would be willing to receive the goods If the batch of coffee meets the quality demands set by the buyers, the quality inspectors issue

a certificate and the coffee is immediately loaded onto trucks and transported

to the port With that certificate, the coffee effectively enters the global coffee market

Based on the descriptions above, it is clear that cognition of coffee’s

‘commodity evaluation criteria’ is uneven across the network Coffee quality (in the green bean form) as practised at the processing-export interface is not regimented down the chains like an ‘industrial production conveyor belt’ In Dak Lak, there is an absence of a meticulous extension programme dis-seminating information about coffee cultivation and on-farm processing (GTZ/

Vinacafe, 1999) Though the Institute of Coffee Research does produce

materials and media programmes providing information on the technicalities of coffee cultivation, understandably the dissemination of these is often restricted

to the more developed and accessible areas Pioneering peasants at the ‘edge’

of the frontier, are not located within the reach of such comfort Instead, the montage above reveals stories of self-enrolment into a complex global agro-food process that is then deeply embedded in local dynamics

By migrating outside the State’s New Economic Zone programmes, the

precipitate peasants in Thon 9 had aimed to grab a share of the ‘coffee rush’.

The concept of ‘enrolment’ in actor-network theory refers to the process whereby roles are offered to the actors so as to enlist them into the network (Callon, 1986: 211; Murdoch, 1997b: 739) In this instance, the precipitate peasants manifested both determination and initiative to ‘self-enrol’ into the coffee network when they carved out plots of land from existing forests and laid claims to the land, outside State auspices They then sourced their own seeds, found their own ways of cultivating the coffee trees, and ‘walked’ their way into the coffee marketing networks of the traders Knowledge of cultivation and commodity value are extended more through inter-personal

networks reflected in the phrase ‘nguoi di sau hoc hoi nguoi di truoc’ (ask and

observe those who came earlier), and individual innovation of cultivation

techniques ‘moi nguoi moi cach’ (each has his own way); more, that is, than via

some meticulous State plan

The term ‘lay ngan nuoi dai’ (using short term crops to invest in the long

term crops) with its direct application to the business of cultivating coffee, reflects a dictum of survival at the pioneer front and its practice serves as the means by which a ‘frontier windfall’ can later materialise This twin dictum is translated during the production process into a mode of ordering of ‘harvest quantity’ The term ‘mode of ordering’ refers to ‘the patterns or regularities that may be imputed to the particulars’ that tell the way things are run and conducted in the network (Law, 1994: 83) This mode of ordering is premised

on reaping a profit from the frontier and surviving the conditions of life at the frontier, in both physiological and sociological terms A good harvest would provide the necessary income to buy food and other necessities for human consumption, and inputs to maintain the trees Consecutive good harvests and sustained high coffee price would even make the peasants ‘rich’ Harvested coffee available on hand gives them the reserves needed to participate in the frontier community’s social life, as when Van sold bags of coffee to prepare for his daughter’s wedding feast