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Viewing articles tagged 'coffee'
Viewing articles tagged 'coffee'
4 articles
The land, and what was planted on it
Vietnam went from a marginal coffee producer to the second largest in the world in about fifteen years, on the red basalt of the Central Highlands. The story of how that happened and the story of what happened to us are the same story told from two ends. Forest cover in our highlands fell from 42.8 percent in 1990 to 19 percent in 2020, and most...
Land law and customary land
In Vietnam nobody owns land. The land belongs to the entire people, the State represents the people, and what a family holds is a right to use, written on a certificate with red covers. That arrangement did not have to be aimed at us to take our country from us. A registry that records the field a family is cropping this season, in one household...
The great migration: New Economic Zones and settlers
In 1921 there were twenty Vietnamese living in Darlac. By 1997 there were a million and a half people in the province that replaced it, and we were one in five of them. No war, epidemic or famine did that. It was done by migration: first planned by the state, family by family into New Economic Zones, and then, when coffee made the highlands rich...
Forests, logging and the sacred groves
The highlands were forest country, and the forest was ours: farmland in rotation, hunting ground, the place of the spirits and of the dead. After 1975 the forest became state property, managed by state forest enterprises and cleared for settlers and coffee, until less than a fifth of the region was under trees. What remains is being handed back...
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