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Lam Dong to double arabica plantation areas by 2015
Vietnam’s Lam Dong province, the country’s second-biggest coffee grower, plans to almost double the land devoted to arabica by 2015 to boost farmers’ incomes.
Arabica cultivation in the central highlands province will be expanded to 20,000 hectares, from more than 10,000 hectares, Pham S, deputy head of the provincial agricultural department, said in an interview Tuesday. The province has 136,000 hectares of coffee land in total.
“It’ll be a waste of land if we keep growing robusta in areas that are good for arabica, which has a much higher value,” Pham S said. “The increase in arabica land also means that we will reduce area for robusta,” he added.
Vietnam, the world’s second-biggest coffee producer and largest robusta grower, has 529,000 hectares of coffee land, of which about 23,000 hectares is arabica, according to figures from the agricultural ministry. Robusta is the cheaper, bitter-tasting variety used mostly in instant drinks.
The government is trying to reduce the country’s coffee area to as low as 450,000 hectares to protect export prices, Doan Trieu Nhan, a senior adviser to the Vietnam Coffee and Cocoa Association, said by phone Tuesday from Hanoi.
Arabica-coffee futures for December delivery closed at $1.241 a pound on ICE on September 4. On London’s Liffe exchange, robusta coffee for November delivery closed at $1,494 a metric ton Monday, the equivalent of 68 cents a pound, according to Bloomberg calculations.
“It’ll be more economically efficient for farmers in Lam Dong to shift their aging and poor-condition robusta land into arabica,” said Le Quang Dao, deputy head of the Lam Dong unit of Hanoi-based Thai Hoa Production and Trading Corp., Vietnam’s second-biggest coffee shipper. “It’s always been easier for us to sell arabica,” Dao said in an interview Monday.
thanhnien, Bloomberg
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