paul o'neill on helping the poor

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Wed Jul 18 05:39:43 PDT 2001


On Wed, 18 Jul 2001, Daniel Davies wrote:


> > At the same time, the World Bank and its cousin, the Asian Development
> > Bank, gave generous loans to Vietnam to plant huge amounts of low-quality
> > robusta coffee
>
> I don't think this is necessarily true -- there's certainly nothing
> low-quality about Vietnamese coffee. It's absolutely delicious.

I think what Gene Coyle (the original commentator) really meant here was "high-volume, low price of production robusta" -- i.e., compared to arabica.

Out of curiousity, did you drink it in Vietnam? Every time I read about coffee growing in Central America, the reporter always points out that inside the countries, you can only get instant. And you'd think that would be even more true in a tea culture. And with coffee growing was such a recent phenomenon there. So it would be interesting if coffee drinking was widespread and affordable inside the country.

Michael

__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com



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