Livelihoods on contentious terroir: Re-valuing Vietnamese coffee farms and their soils

This paper analyzes how commodity producers shape and contest the role of provenance in the production of value. Textures of agrarian livelihoods depend on relations that realize diverse types of economic, social and natural-cultural value. In analyzing the value of place, economic geographies of commodities tend to focus primarily on governance and macro-level processes, leaving links between producers’ everyday practices and broader changes underexplored. Livelihood studies and economic anthropologies, by contrast, often focus on “the everyday” but stop short of unpacking how producers struggle with material-cultural constructions of value. Through an ethnography of farmers and processors of specialty-grade coffee in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, this paper advances these debates on agency and everyday labor, showing how livelihoods of making can rework not just commodities but potentials and resonances of place. Though Vietnam has a reputation in the coffee industry for poor quality, a small subset of producers are changing practices to produce coffee with highly-desired sensory qualities, remaking their farms as sites of high-value production through changes such as careful soil management—and pushing a revaluation of Vietnam as a coffee origin. This paper analyzes their work by drawing critically on the idea of terroir: a malleable concept that links geographies of origin to commodity quality in variable, contentious ways. This argument pushes economic geography and commodity studies by illustrating that the labor of commodity producers can only be understood by studying how their constrained agencies relate to architectures of quality and value, including the contentions of terroir.