Article written by Rebecca Tan, Nhung Nguyen, via https://www.washingtonpost.com on 15 May 2023
Vietnam is going all-in on a climate-change resistant coffee bean Thuan Sarzynski, who helps lead coffee sustainability efforts in Vietnam for ECOM Agroindustrial, a multinational commodities trading group, shows off a robusta coffee plant at the ECOM experimental farm in Lam Dong province, Vietnam, on April 14.
“And Vietnamese robusta, everyone knows, is number one in the world.” Much of the pivot to robusta is by necessity.
In 2021, a severe frost in Brazil damaged up to 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres) worth of predominantly arabica coffee crops, leaving behind scars that may take years to heal. Back-to-back hurricanes have battered arabica coffee fields in Honduras, while unpredictable changes in rainfall have devastated coffee farmers in Colombia. More than 93 percent of the coffee Vietnam produces is robusta.