Vietnam’s coffee harvest headache

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The latest coffee harvest in the world’s second largest growing country is suffering damage from erratic weather. From drought to typhoons, the effects of climate change have hampered production in the Southeast Asian giant. Written by Maja Wallengren.

Vietnam‘s 2024-2025 coffee harvest might be in trouble. Stretched over more than 500 kilometres, from the southern-most point of the coffee province of Lam Dong through Dak Lak to the northern most point of Gia Lai, the country’s top-growing region of the Central Highlands has long been an example to follow for its high yields.

The 2024-25 harvest is not even going to be close to average production. The sharp decline in yields on farms across the region – home to at least 70 per cent of total Vietnam coffee output in an average crop cycle – are in best-case scenario going to be down 10 to 20 per cent from the 2023-24 crop, according to growers and exporters.

“The new harvest is going to be small again because most of the growers have suffered from the drought and did not have good conditions for flowering, so there is very little fruit on the trees,” Ho Quoc Huy, a small-scale grower with two hectares of coffee about 30 kilometres from Buon Ma Thuot, tells Global Coffee Report during a visit in late September 2024.

“The drought was very bad for the flowering for the new 2024-25 crop because the coffee trees were already weak after the drought last year. When our family farm was hit by drought again this year most of the flowers died,” says Tina Trinh, another smallholder grower in Dak Lak.

During the 2023-24 cycle, drought and severe dryness during flowering caused widespread damage to yields in Vietnam’s growing regions. This damage was further aggravated ahead of flowering for the 2024-25 crop due to the continuing El Niño weather phenomenon, which is known to cause above-average temperature resulting in reduced rains, extreme dryness, and drought. In December 2023, El Niño struck Vietnamese coffee regions for the second year in a row with drought that lasted until April 2024. This not only caused excessive dryness but was also paired with an extreme heatwave.

“After the drought, we got the very hot weather that burned the leaves and left most of the trees defoliated,” says Trinh. “Now, the trees have at least 20 or 30 per cent less fruit than we had in the last crop.”

Exemptions are few and far between. Driving hundreds of kilometres across the top coffee province of Dak Lak, a large majority of trees only have crop on the bottom third of branches. The upper third and middle of the trees have so little crop that the new cherries with beans for the 2024-25 harvest can be counted on one or two hands.

Travelling more than 300 kilometres from Dak Lak to Vietnam’s second largest coffee growing province of Gia Lai, farm after farm continues to reveal two-thirds of branches with zero fruit.

Growers across the two provinces say yields are down 30 to 50 per cent from initial expectations for a small recovery from the last crop, but which now is being confirmed as the 2024-25 harvest set to come in 10 to 20 per cent below the last crop.

Miraculously, even though most of the worst hit trees were left wilted and without foliage after the drought and extreme heat, the trees did not die. However, they didn’t recover in time for the flowers to develop into fruit-set or the bean formation period that follows.

“The good news is the trees did not die, but the impact has been so bad that the coffee farms cannot recover in full for another two crop cycles. Therefore, even if we are able to see some recovery by the 2025-26 harvest, a full recovery will not be possible until the 2026-27 crop and that still depends on getting good weather,” says Le Dinh Tu of the Aeroco Specialty Coffee Farm, located in the Cao Thanh village about one hour from Buon Ma Thuot, Vietnam’s coffee capital.

“See these branches here, there is no fruit,” says Tu, pointing to the sad sight of many trees on his farm with little or no new cherries on branches. “This is the direct impact of the drought and the heat, because even in the farms that have irrigation the drought was so bad there was no water available to use. While the trees did not die, the leaves still dried and fell off.”

Because of the widespread defoliation of trees across the country’s coffee regions, tree agronomy forces the little flowering that survived the extreme weather to produce new leaves in order for the tree to survive. This results in even less flowering for fruit for the new crop.

VICOFA, Vietnam’s official Coffee and Cocoa Association, said the 2023-24 harvest ended down 20 per cent at 24.5 million bags, one of the smallest crops in the past 10 years. With drought preventing recovery for a second year in a row, the 2024-25 harvest is now projected to drop to about 22 million bags total Robusta and Arabica, a senior VICOFA official told Global Coffee Report.

Official export figures confirm the sharp drop in supply, with Vietnam’s General Department of Customs reporting Vietnamese coffee shipments from January to October 2024 down 11.2 per cent to 19.17 million bags. This represents a drop of more than 2.4 million bags from the first 10 months in 2023, the customs agency reported in early November.

Initial harvest reports from Vietnam back up the general consensus of a minimum drop of 10 per cent in the 2024-25 harvest, with Reuters News in a report on 28 November quoting traders in Vietnam saying “so far this crop year is way lower than previously”.

At Intimex, Vietnam’s largest coffee exporter, senior official Ngoc Quang says the biggest problem for the local coffee trade is the big drop caused by drought to Vietnam’s 2023-24 crop, which went largely unreported until export figures started to come down in the first quarter of 2024.

“The really big drop was in the last harvest and even though the new 2024-25 harvest will be another small crop, we still believe it won’t be too much smaller than the last crop, and at the most not more than 10 per cent lower,” says Quang.

Across the southern coffee plains that produce most of the country’s Robusta crop to the most remote northern mountains of Son La, home to most of Vietnam’s Arabica harvest, the story continues to be of severe impact from the drought to the new harvest.

“This year the coffee yield is very poor and I will get a lot less than what I could harvest last year,” says Lo Thi Tuoi, a smallholder grower from Tai Dam, one of the many minority groups the government helped to start growing Arabica coffee over the past 20 years to improve local living conditions.

“Last year I could pick seven tons of red cherry, but this year because of the drought I will not get more than one to two tons of cherries. Since December 2023, we have hardly had any rain here until the end of April and at that time it was too late for the trees to recover. Most of the flowers fell off the trees and we only got very little fruit,” says Thi Tuoi.

In recent years, Vietnam’s Arabica crop has stabilised between 1.1 to 1.4 million bags. While it doesn’t get as much attention in global markets as the country’s much bigger Robusta crop, the one-million figure makes Vietnam the world’s 12th largest Arabica grower.

From the commercial production of Arabica in the north to ongoing changes to the Robusta regions in the south, Vietnam’s coffee landscape is going through a period of significant change. It’s not just the growing percentage of old Robusta areas renovated with higher paying alternative crops such as durian fruit and black pepper that’s taking a toll on Vietnam’s coffee production but also industrial development.

When Vietnam’s coffee boom first started to take off in earnest in the late 1990s, visitors to Buon Ma Thuot, the coffee capital of the Central Highlands, would find coffee farms in the backyard of many houses and family land plots right outside the city. Yet today, buyers and visitors have to travel at least 20 kilometres out or town before coffee farms start to appear along the road.

“Everybody wants to build a house as close to the city as possible, so land has become very expensive and many coffee farms closer to town have been replaced by houses or new business developments,” says Le Quang, a local businessman who runs coffee shop BM House with his brother, coffee grower Ho Quoc Huy.

As physical picking of Vietnam’s new 2024-25 crop got underway by late November, international prices for Arabica coffee soared to 50-year-highs. At the same time, Robusta prices were chasing new all-time highs at more than US$5,600 per metric ton.

With the global market increasingly nervous about the growing supply deficit sparked by drought in both Vietnam and the world’s largest grower Brazil, attention is turning to the remaining stocks in importing ports, which at the time of reporting stood at between 15 and 16 million bags, according to data from the USDA, the European Coffee Federation, and the All Japan Coffee Association.

This is the lowest figure in recorded history according to the stock-consumption-ratio, also known as the stocks-to-use ratio, which is used to calculate the percentage that measures the stocks available for consumption relative to core supply-demand. It represents less than one month of global demand at current levels.

But, even with near historic high prices, for any new supply coming to the market from Vietnam’s new 2024-25 harvest, competition between buyers for the local market and exporters will remain fierce as local consumption is buying up increasing shares of the crop.

“We have so many coffee shops in Buon Ma Thuot and it’s a very good market for our coffee, both the local market and for tourists who all want to buy the coffee because we have a lot of high-quality beans and even specialty coffee,” says Huy, who opened the BM House 10 years ago and has since expanded twice.

The growing demand from the local market is adding increasing pressure on the trade and exporters, and there is no indication this will slow. The U.S. Department of Agriculture confirms the steady surge in demand, projecting local consumption in Vietnam to rise to 3.6 million bags in the 2024-25 crop cycle, up 12.5 per cent from 3.2 million bags just two years ago in the 2022-23 marketing year. And local farmers are in no rush to sell the new crop.

“The drought at the beginning of the flowering caused us to have a lot less cherries, but compared to previous years farmers are in no a hurry to sell because today everybody has other incomes from durian, pepper, or other crops, so they don’t rely on coffee only,” says Trinh.

For the many commercials in the coffee market dedicated to maintaining their business share, it’s time to buy coffee, because even including the last remaining stocks, there is not enough coffee to go around for all at the scale the market has grown accustomed to.

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