--- Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote: >
> 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.
>
As far as I can tell, Vietnamese coffee is arabica, although a quick google search is somewhat ambiguous. I do know that the majority of the crop is sold in a couple of huge contracts with instant coffee producers, which I suppose would support the high-volume theory.
> 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.
Yeh, they sell it everywhere, and it's cheap. I would guess it's at least as popular as tea. I even visited the plantations in the central highlands around Buon Ma Thot (and bloody boring they were too, is my advice for time-constrained holidaymakers). My guess is that the stuff you buy in Vietnam is arabica and the export contracts are all for World Bank stuff.
At this point I probably ought to plug my mate Jeff's Moka Cafe in Hanoi, if any list-members are ever in the area. Don't worry about supporting American imperialism by going there for a coffee, as all the profits are immediately expropriated by his local "partner".
dd
>
> Michael
>
> __________________________________________________________________________
> Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com
>
>
===== ... in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. -- Bertrand Russell
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