Under the coffee is the ore. Vietnam holds the world's third-largest bauxite reserves, and almost all of them are under the Central Highlands — 5.4 billion tonnes by the 2007 masterplan, across twenty-five planned mines in Dak Nong and Lam Dong. The projects that followed produced the largest open political argument in modern Vietnam, and almost none of it was about us.
What was decided, and when
On 1 November 2007, Decision 167 of the Prime Minister authorised extraction of 5.4 billion tonnes of bauxite from the Central Highlands in two phases, 2007–2015 and 2016–2025. The plan named twenty-five mines and seven alumina plants: thirteen mines in Dak Nong holding some 3.4 billion tonnes, and five in Lam Dong holding around 970 million. The state coal and minerals corporation, Vinacomin, planned projects spanning more than 1,800 square kilometres. The capital required to 2025 was put at roughly 15.6 billion US dollars.
Two complexes went ahead.
| Tan Rai | Nhan Co | |
|---|---|---|
| Where | Bao Loc district, Lam Dong | Dak R'lap district, Dak Nong |
| Started | July 2008 | 2008–09 |
| Design output | 600,000 t/yr alumina, rising to 1.2 million | 600,000–650,000 t/yr, rising to 1.2 million |
| Contractor | Chalieco, a subsidiary of the Aluminum Corporation of China | |
| Households affected (official) | 1,639, of which 404 ethnic minority | 861, of which 15 ethnic minority |
Those household figures are the government's own, and critics at the time expected the affected area to be substantially larger than the official one.
The argument that followed
The bauxite projects produced something Vietnam had not seen: a sustained public campaign against a decided government policy, conducted by people the state could not easily dismiss.
- 5 January 2009 — General Võ Nguyên Giáp, then in his late nineties and the most decorated figure in the country, writes to the Prime Minister asking that the projects be halted. Giáp cites a Soviet-assisted study from the 1980s whose experts had advised against mining on ecological grounds, and raises the presence of hundreds of Chinese labourers, with estimates of several thousand per project.
- 12 April 2009 — A petition drafted by Professor Nguyễn Huệ Chi, the writer Phạm Toàn and Professor Nguyễn Thế Hùng demands that the projects be put to the National Assembly, that mining cease pending that review, and that the feasibility studies be opened to public scrutiny. It is signed by 135 intellectuals, and the website built around it becomes the campaign's centre.
- May–June 2009 — Bauxite is debated in the National Assembly. Over the same period several prominent bloggers are arrested.
- 2009–2010 — A Catholic vigil at Thái Hà parish draws more than a thousand people; "no bauxite" T-shirts circulate; a lawsuit is filed against the Prime Minister. In March 2010, malware distributed through altered Vietnamese-language software targets the blogs carrying the campaign.
What the argument was about, and what it was not about
Read the objections in order and a pattern appears. The environmental case was about red mud — the caustic residue of alumina refining, roughly 70 per cent water and 30 per cent sodium hydroxide — sitting in impoundments above the headwaters of rivers that feed the Mekong and the southern delta. The national security case was about Chinese contractors and Chinese workers in the strategic centre of the country; Major General Nguyễn Trọng Vĩnh warned that thousands of Chinese workers would in effect make the region a base. The economic case was that the numbers did not work.
All three are serious arguments and we do not dispute any of them. But notice who is missing. The plateau appears in the campaign as a watershed, as a strategic location, and as an investment. It rarely appears as somebody's home.
The exception is the writer Nguyễn Ngọc, who has lived and worked in the highlands for decades. Nguyễn Ngọc argued that indigenous life there is intimately and inextricably connected to land and forest, and that the mining projects continued thirty years of displacement programmes to a point of no return. That is the argument we would make, made by somebody else, and it was a minority position inside a campaign that otherwise ran on national rather than indigenous grounds.
404 households, and what a household is
The official figure for Tan Rai is 1,639 affected households, 404 of them ethnic minority. Set against 5.4 billion tonnes and 15.6 billion dollars, 404 looks like a rounding error, and that is how it was treated.
But a household in a highland village is not a house on a plot. It is a position in a kinship system, a share of communal land, a place in a longhouse, and a set of obligations that only work at the distance a village puts people at. Move four hundred households and the thing you have broken is not four hundred dwellings; it is however many villages those households constituted. The compensation is calculated on the dwelling.
Where it stands
Both complexes were built and both operate. Production has run well below the projections of the masterplan, and the economics have been questioned continuously since. In November 2010 the Prime Minister, Nguyễn Tấn Dũng, said the deposits might total some 11 billion tonnes, which would make them the largest in the world.
That is the fact to hold on to. The 2007 plan was phase one of two, running to 2025, over a resource that may be the largest of its kind anywhere. Whatever has been extracted so far, what sits under Dak Nong and Lam Dong guarantees that the pressure on this land does not end with coffee.
Sources
- "The Vietnamese Bauxite Mining Controversy: the Emergence of a New Oppositional Politics" — Decision 167, the project specifications, the 2009 sequence, and the affected-household figures
- Bauxite mining in Vietnam — reserves, Vinacomin's plans, Chalco/Chalieco, and the 2010 statement on total deposits
- Radio Free Asia, "Vietnam Set To Open Mine", 17 March 2009 — Giáp's letter, the red mud composition, and Nguyễn Ngọc on the indigenous case
- The petition of 12 April 2009, in English
Compiled September 2026. We do not have a current account of what happened to the households moved for Tan Rai and Nhan Co, or of conditions at the resettlement sites. If you were moved for either project, that is exactly the gap — read reporting safely, then write to us.