Cocoa in Vietnam’s Central Highlands

The forest-rich Central Highlands of Vietnam, where historically marginalized ethnic minority communities form a significant part of the population, is characterized by poverty, lack of development and vulnerability to natural disasters, such as drought. But these ethnic communities, which used to rely on forest resources, are increasingly vulnerable as they continue to lose access to forests, due to intensified monoculture agriculture, which requires forest clearance.

Enter ACDI/VOCA

Since 2006 under U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funding, ACDI/VOCA’s SUCCESS Alliance has been helping to provide the ethnic minority communities in Dak Lak Province with improved livelihoods via introduction to the cocoa market. Through the introduction of high-yield clones, training and good agricultural practices for cocoa producers, and improvements in the cocoa supply chain, cocoa development promises improved living standards both through increased income and also through maintaining the forest ecosystem. With global demand for cocoa growing rapidly and the local price having more than doubled in recent months, cocoa is being seen as a viable alternative to more traditional crops, such as coffee, rubber and cashew for investment.

In 2007, ACDI/VOCA initiated a small pilot project in another Central Highlands province, Lam Dong, with funding from a private cocoa trading company, Touton, S.A. of France, in partnership with World Wildlife Fund and local organizations. The pilot will further demonstrate that cocoa can be successfully grown by smallholder farmers under the forest canopy and intercropped with other economically-viable tree crops. This model will not only help poor ethnic minority farmers improve their livelihoods and emerge from poverty, but it will also prevent deforestation, erosion, and drought which will improve long-term prospects for the region.

ACDI/VOCA was one of the first key players in establishing a cocoa sector in Vietnam, starting in the Mekong River Delta and Southeast regions under the USDA-funded SUCCESS Alliance project in 2003. The SUCCESS Alliance is a public-private partnership of U.S. donors (USAID, USDA), private industry, (Mars, Inc., the World Cocoa Foundation), and numerous local partners in government and academia.

The "Perfect" Crop?

Cocoa is an especially attractive crop, because it serves several national priority objectives: poverty reduction (the crop lends itself primarily to smallholder farmers, or those with less than 2 hectares of land), conservation (as an understory crop cocoa preserves rapidly disappearing forest land subject to clear-cutting for traditional monoculture crops such as rubber and cashews), biodiversity (habitats for local wildlife is maintained), diversification of farmer income (expanded agricultural commodities for local economic risk reduction), and a positive national trade balance (export demand for cocoa is growing).

ACDI/VOCA hopes to expand its support to farmers in a third Central Highland province and expand support to Dak Lak and Lam Dong provinces in the near future. In the meantime, new cocoa farmers in Dak Lak and Lam Dong provinces are acquiring the technical skills to tend their new high-value cocoa crops.

For more information about ACDI/VOCA's work with cocoa, click here.

For more information about ACDI/VOCA's work in Vietnam, click here.