As the coffee bean harvesting season begins, plantation owners in southern Laos face a shortage of laborers because of low wages and high inflation in the small, landlocked Southeast Asia country, said people who work in the industry.
Workers on plantations in Champassak province’s Paksong district are shunning jobs that pay just US$10-13 a day, based on the weight of coffee beans they pick, and instead heading for better paying work in neighboring Thailand. Others have sought jobs on cassava farms, where the pay is slightly better, a coffee farm worker told Radio Free Asia on Tuesday.
Coffee growers in the district usually need 400-600 workers to harvest the beans, a plantation owner in the district said.
Coffee beans are the main cash crop for many small-scale farmers in Laos and the country’s third-largest agricultural export product. Lao coffee is exported to more than 26 countries in Asia, Europe and North America, according to the International Trade Centre in Geneva, Switzerland.
Most coffee farms in Laos are located in Champassak, Sekong and Salavan provinces on the Bolaven Plateau, known as the country’s coffee heartland. Sitting atop an ancient volcano, the plateau’s nutrient-rich soil and cool climate are conducive to growing coffee trees.
Other coffee-growing areas are in Houaphanhand Xieng Khouang provinces in the north.
A view of a coffee plantation in Paksong district of southern Laos’ Champasak province in September 2018. (RFA)
But the country’s current high inflation rate, which stood at nearly 25% in March, is driving laborers to jobs that pay better wages, people involved in the industry said.
“Many laborers like to seek higher-paid jobs in Thailand as they get paid low working in the country,” the coffee plantation employee said. Like others in this report, he insisted on not being identified for fear of getting in trouble. “Therefore, we are facing a shortage of labor now, and inflation is the main factor causing this problem.”
Desperate for workers
The coffee farm owner in Paksong said the labor shortage in the industry is nothing new and that inflation has been a key factor.
“If they work for us, they earn around US$100-150 per month, but they can earn around US$350 per month if they work in Thailand,” he said.
To cope with the current labor shortage, some coffee farm owners have raised wages to attract more laborers, which means higher fixed costs.
The coffee farm owner said he has had to double wages to US$15-20 a day to get workers to pick the beans.
“If we do not provide this rate, they will not work for us,” he said. “Some laborers just come to work for the coffee harvesting season, but go back to Thailand once [it] ends.”
A woman works in the rain on a coffee plantation on the Bolaven plateau in southern Laos, Sept. 2, 2003. (Karl Malakunas/AFP)
The labor shortage in Laos’ coffee industry began in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a Champassak province official with knowledge of the situation, who declined to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media.
There were over 218,00 confirmed cases of the highly contagious respiratory infection in Laos, and nearly 760 recorded deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, which stopped collecting data in March 2023.
A coffee growers association has contacted the provincial Department of Labor and Social Welfare for help in finding seasonal laborers for the past three years, the official said.
“We tried to help coffee farm operators in the province to find laborers to meet their needs, but very few people are interested in working in this kind of job,” he said.
Thongphat Vongmany, deputy minister of agriculture and forestry, said in February that Laos’ agricultural exports totaled US$1.44 billion in 2023, but he did not give a separate breakdown for coffee exports.
Agriculture Minister Phet Phomphiphak, however, told the country’s National Assembly in December 2023 that Laos’ coffee exports during the first nine months of 2023 totaled US$64 million.
Translated by Phouvong for RFA Laos. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Lao.
This story was originally published by Modern Farmer and is republished with permission.
It starts out as unnoticeable, lying dormant for two or even four years. It’s undetectable. But slowly, the signs come out. Individual branches on a tree point to signs of a nutrient deficiency or perhaps overwatering. Branches will start to yellow and weaken, turning shriveled. Then, the fruit will turn, becoming small and refusing to ripen and, sometimes, dropping early. The fruit is safe for human consumption, but it tastes like battery acid.
And once the tree reaches that point, there’s no coming back. The tree will die within a few years no matter what intervention you try. That’s why when growers see trees infected with Huanglongbing, known as HLB or citrus greening, they immediately look to remove the tree. There’s no other option.
“We’re destroying all the trees that get infected. We’re monitoring and eradicating those where we can. We’re using biological controls with the loss. We’re using every tool in the bag,” says Jared Plumlee, senior vice president of farming at Booth Ranches, in Orange Cove, CA. Plumblee oversees about 7,000 acres in the central San Joaquin Valley, growing navel oranges, valencias, mandarins and even some lemons and grapefruits. There’s no sign of HLB in the Booth orchards yet, and Plumlee aims to keep it that way. The ranch also has its own packing house onsite, where they pack only their own product. That’s both to foster trust with consumers, so they know every piece of fruit in a Booth box came from that farm, and to keep potentially infected fruit out.
HLB is a disease spread by the insect Asian citrus psyllid, which infects trees with a slow-growing bacteria while it feeds on their shoots. It’s commonly spread as the insect travels across borders in fruit or tree cuttings, but a warming climate is speeding things along. The transmission of citrus greening depends on temperature—both to ensure that the psyllid survives and that the host trees are at their most vulnerable. Temperatures between 60 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit allow the disease to thrive. Research has shown that areas that stay within that range for at least half of the year have the most cases of HLB.
As global temperatures rise, citrus greening infestations can—and will—move further north. Tracking the spread of HLB is, in some ways, tracking the warming climate.
Growers can often, unknowingly, graft an infected tree limb onto their otherwise healthy stock. That’s how citrus groves in Texas, and most especially Florida, fell victim to the disease. HLB was first discovered in Florida in 2005, where it promptly tore through the state’s orange and grapefruit groves, infecting close to 90 percent of the citrus. Nearly 20 years later, last season’s orange production is a mere 16 percent of the yield in 2003. And overall citrus production continues to fall, every year for the past five years. This year’s orange yield is predicted to be 25 percent lower than last years’ final production.
Citrus grower Peter Spyke of Arapaho Citrus Management holding a greening HLB (huanglongbing) symptomatic citrus and a healthy one in a citrus grove, where he has planted a few dozen different tree varieties to study which one will best tolerate disease, in Fort Pierce, Florida on November 21, 2019.
GIANRIGO MARLETTA/AFP via Getty Images
Across the country, California growers have paid close attention to what their colleagues in Florida experienced, and they have no desire to go down the same road. “We see those numbers [from Florida], and it’s very, very frightening,” says Plumlee. As California’s annual temperatures fall squarely in the range for optimal HLB transmission, growers are as proactive as possible, even getting state legislation passed that allows citrus growers to essentially tax themselves and put the money towards research and eradication programs. “We’ve been fairly successful thus far; it still hasn’t been found in commercial orchards,” says Plumlee.
California is home to roughly 300,000 acres of citrus production across the state. There have been infected trees found in California, throughout Los Angeles and Orange counties and along the coast near San Diego. But, so far, the bacteria has stuck to residential trees or others easily removed.
“Last year, some nursery stock was sent from South Carolina from a nursery that had citrus canker,” says Victoria Hornbaker, director of the Citrus Pest and Disease Prevention Division at the California Department of Food and Agriculture. “But our team was able to react incredibly quickly to get out to those locations, collect that nursery stock, destroy it and do a one-mile survey of all citrus around those locations to make sure that we didn’t see any symptoms of citrus canker in the environment. So, that is a good example of how quickly we can mobilize and respond to potential issues regarding citrus.”
The citrus industry isn’t just important within California but across the country. Florida may be known for oranges, but it’s primarily grown oranges for juice. California has historically been the home of fresh citrus, growing 85 percent of the nation’s table fruit. “If we lose California citrus, we also lose our national and international market,” Hornbaker says. That means importing more citrus from outside the country, raising prices, and losing a tremendous amount of revenue all around.
That’s why California growers have such a focus on proactivity, and why there’s an incredible amount of research into citrus greening coming out of California institutions. University of California, Riverside is working on a treatment that effectively kills the bacteria, although it’s still being tested within industry. Growers are experimenting with higher-density planting, putting more trees in the ground per acre, to get a higher yield in a shorter amount of time. Although, as Plumlee explains, that also has a significant drawback. “The longevity of planting like that might not be 50 years; it may only be 25. Because once the trees fill in, you kind of hit this plateau on what your production level can be. So, in the face of HLB, you’re going to turn the ground over faster.”
Breeders are also working to find new varieties that are less susceptible to HLB. The Sugar Belle mandarin, the hybrid of a clementine and a Minneola, has shown promising resistance. The new variety was born out of research from the University of Florida and released to growers across the state in 2009. More than a decade later, the Sugar Belle is among the top-grown varieties in the state.
Oddly, there does seem to be a correlation between the size of the citrus and the resistance to the bacteria, although it’s not clear if size is a determining factor or simply a coincidence. But Neil McRoberts, a professor of plant pathology at University of California, Davis, says that grapefruit and large oranges are less resistant to the disease, with smaller mandarins showing more disease resistance. “Because our citrus comes from so few different progenitor lines, they don’t have any natural resistance to the bacterium. So, none of our favorite citrus types and varieties have much resistance in general,” McRoberts explains.
There could be a cure out there. But it won’t be on the horizon in five years or even 10. “I can see that, maybe in 20 years, we’ll be in a position where, if we don’t actually have a cure, we’ll at least have citrus that is able to stand up and keep producing a crop,” says McRoberts. “There are some promises out there, but it’s slow work.”
In the meantime, Plumlee and other growers have no choice but to keep going and keep growing. “You can’t just throw up your hands and quit. You keep doing the science and the trials and try to solve this puzzle. But, in the short term, there’s not a whole lot that you can do that we haven’t already done.” Growers like Plumlee have a crop that’s vital to the state and the nation and a disease that they are fighting to keep at bay. For now, they simply have to hold on—for a decade or two—until more effective methods are available.
“That is the scary part,” says Plumlee. “If we had something today, right out of the lab that works, we’re still 10 or 15 years from proving it out that it actually works. And then another 10, probably before it’s all implemented out in the industry. So, we know that time is not our friend.”
About 100 coffee growers in Vietnam’s Central Highlands staged a protest to regain land rights they lost after they stopped sending some of their crops to a forestry company that had allotted the parcels to them but did not invest in production, farmers involved in the demonstration said Thursday.
The Southeast Asian country is one of the world’s leading exporters of coffee, with the Vietnam General Statistics Office predicting exports worth U.S. $3 billion for 2021, up more than 9.4% over the previous year. The Central Highlands are Vietnam’s largest coffee-growing area,
The protest followed a court ruling against farmers who refused to provide Buon Ja Wam Forestry Company Ltd. with a portion of their annual output as rent payment.
The group of farmers from the country’s majority Kinh ethnic group and ethnic minority people who live in Ea Kiet village of Cu M’Gar district have gathered for four days to object to the revocation of land-use rights, they said.
The farmers say they cleared the land themselves, but then had to turn over what they produced to the company, which collected their crops without providing fertilizer, water or technical assistance.
The Cu M’Gar District People’s Court issued the ruling in a lawsuit initiated by Buon Ja Wam against the farmers.
In 2018, the company took legal action against 13 households that had failed to fulfill their responsibilities in accordance with leasing contracts they signed with the company.
In 1993, local authorities allocated 6,940 hectares (17,149 acres) of forest land in the Eo Kiet and Ea Kueh commnunes to Buon Ja Wam. Three years later, the company signed contracts with local residents stating that it would lease them 400 hectares (988) of land and receive part of their crops as rent payment each year.
But since 2016, many farmers have refused to deliver their crops to the company, which then sued them for nonpayment of debt and demanded they return the land.
A resident of one hamlet in the area, who requested anonymity for safety reasons, said the farmers decided to fight for their rights in response to the company’s dishonesty.
“As we all know, when doing business together, the company should have had some investments to enable farmers to do their farming work so that they could pay taxes and products to the company,” he said.
“Although the company did not give farmers a single grain of fertilizer or a drop of water or any technical assistance, it still collected the farmers’ crops,” he said.
The villager also said that Buon Ja Wam used to send staff to intimidate and threaten farmers who failed to make their in-kind payments on time, beating some to the point where they sustained serious injuries.
Local authorities told the villagers that they could not do anything to help them.
“We think there must be an interest group backing this company,” the resident said. “Their wrongdoings have been obvious, but as rank-and-file farmers, we had no choice but to work as slaves.”
RFA was unable to reach Buon Ja Wam for comment.
Dialogue unlikely
In an article published by Vietnam’s Business and Integration online newspaper in 2018, Phan Quoc Tan, Buon Ja Wam’s deputy director general, said the reason why farmers had stopped making in-kind payments was that “bad guys had encouraged and incited them to do so.”
Local farmers wanted to meet with company officials to discuss the situation, but the company refused the request, said another farmer who also requested anonymity for the same reason.
“Although local residents requested in earnest that Buon Ja Wam Company, local authorities at all levels, and coffee growers sit down together, they [the company] refused to do so,” he said.
“We want the local authorities to mediate the dialogue so that we can find a solution that is mutually beneficial and minimizes losses for both sides,” he said. “We have requested such a dialogue many times, but the authorities still have failed to make it happen.”
Residents say that they cleared the land in the 1980s when the government called for the development of new economic zones in the Central Highlands, and that officials did not allocate the land to Buon Ja Wam to grow coffee until 1996.
Because of this, local residents argued that the government should have granted land-use rights to them instead of to the company.
A farmer who lives in another hamlet in Eo Kiet said his family never received a land-use certificate for a parcel of land they bought from a family who had cleared it in the 1980s.
Although his family has been living on the land for years, they fear they will lose it due to their lack of the certificate.
“What we want is for the authorities, especially the Dak Lak People’s Committee, to revoke the land from the company and return it to the local government,” he told RFA. “Then the local government could allocate the land to local residents so that we can grow crops on our own land in order to pay taxes to the state and secure our livelihoods.”
RFA could not reach Cu M’Ga district officials for comment.
Reported by RFA’s Vietnamese Service. Translated by Anna Vu. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.
