Coffee thieves strike in Vietnam

“Some families [have been] robbed six times in one month,” said Tran Van Dao, the chairman of the Ea H’Ding Commune.

“In some cases thieves hack off whole branches and their victims have to wait years before their fields fully recover.”

This is the sad case of entire Vietnamese coffee fields being gutted by an industrial scale pilfering of some rather lucrative crops.

The thieves in question have been targeting people in some Central Highland regions of the Southeast Asian nation, and in the worst cases some farmers are losing an entire year’s income in one night.

Nguyen Van Tho says that he saw 1.4 hectares of crop disappear shortly before it was due to be harvested. According to reports, the area he was preparing to gather for sale would have fetched just under $4,000 – a sum of money which would have seen him through until next year.

“The remaining cherries are not ripe yet,” he said. “I don’t know how many we can keep.”

It has been a similar tale for another coffee farmer in the Dak Lak province who discovered that hundreds of his plants had been illicitly taken. And the same again for Vu Dinh Duong: “When I arrived at [my] fields, I wept. A year’s worth of hard work was stolen,” he said.

“Thieves are so brazen now…It’s very discouraging to produce coffee so they can just steal it every harvest.”

The local police have confirmed that there has been a spate of these agricultural attacks.

Securing a coffee field, it has been estimated, can hike up production prices from anywhere between 5-10% – something which unfortunately deters farmers who are struggling to make ends meet. But even then, doing so provides no guarantee.

“It’s very expensive,” explained one farmer. “[But] the thieves get more professional.”

One story, recounted to the local press, says that a solitary security guard was powerless against a gang of four coffee raiders.

Of course these thefts are only happening because the criminals can turn a profit from their illegal behaviour. Vietnamese coffee has been shifting slowly at market in recent weeks, but that is because foreign buyers are waiting for prices to drop.

With such a high value attached to the beans at the moments, there is obviously money to be made on black markets.

“Coffee Plantation“. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.