Farmers receive training in sustainable coffee production. – VNS Photo Do Thi Xuan Huong

HCM CITY (Biz Hub) — In the five years since it began, Nestcafe Plan, a joint programme by Nestle, the Western Highlands Agriculture and Forestry Science Institute and other partners, has helped improve coffee quality and productivity and raise coffee yields by 14 per cent per hectare in Viet Nam.

Coffee farmers' incomes have increased by a comparable rate to around VND16 million (US$713) per hectare per year.

With active support from WASI, the project has played a significant role in providing farmers in the four Central Highlands provinces of Dak Lak, Gia Lai, Kon Tum, and Lam Dong with good quality, high-yielding and pest-resistant coffee seedlings.

A total of 11 million seedlings have been supplied since the project began in 2011.

The project has been of great practical benefit since stunted coffee plants with low quality of seeds and productivity accounted were predominant in the Central Highlands, a major coffee growing area in the country.

Apart from supporting farmers with replanting coffee trees, the project has also provided training and technical support to more than 100,000 farmers based on the international 4C (Common Code for Coffee Community) standards for sustainable coffee production and trading.

More than 21,000 of them have been awarded 4C certifications.

Nguyen Cao Tri, a farmer in Lam Dong Province's Di Linh town, said, "Apart from earning higher incomes, our lives have been improved significantly through specific and practical instructions from the project implementers in the past years. I hope the project and farmers continue to co-operate in future."

Nescafe Plan seeks to make Viet Nam an international reference for robusta coffee. – VNS