Contentious terroir and commodity livelihoods:Re-valuing the Vietnamese coffee farm and its soils

This paper analyzes how commodity producers shape and contest the role of place and provenance in the production of value. The textures of agrarian livelihoods and change depend on relations that realize value, and while cultural economic and agri-food studies often investigate the role of place in value chains, little research considers how producers themselves renegotiate the value of origin itself. This paper draws on material-driven ethnographic research in Vietnam's Central Highlands with farmers and processors of specialty-grade coffee. Though Vietnam is the world's second-largest coffee producer, it carries a reputation for poor quality in the coffee industry. A very small subset of coffee producers are pushing a contentious revaluation of Vietnam as a coffee origin by producing higher quality coffee, remaking their farms into sites of high-value production. This paper analyzes their work using the lens of terroir—a controversial concept taken from the wine industry that asserts links between place of production and quality. However terroir is both culturally and materially malleable: soils, ecosystems and production practices are all co-constructed. This paper focuses on producers’ soil management practices, which aim to increase coffee quality by strengthening and caring for soils and ecosystems. These soils become the latest layer in the historical placemaking of Vietnam’s Central Highlands, a site of intense conflict and colonization (both French and internal). Producers exercise agency through their everyday labor, showing rural places of production to be dynamic and evolving rather than fixed and static.