Coffee and subsistence production: complementarity or competition? A case study from an Ede (Rhade) village in Vietnam.

In the Vietnamese Central Highlands, the Ede economy, previously based on subsistence production, has increasingly shifted to coffee. Over the past two decades, coffee has come to dominate Ede agriculture. Meanwhile, land shortages due to various factors plus exhaustion of the forest from extensive internal migration have caused the level of Ede subsistence to deteriorate. Recently a sharp drop in coffee prices has drastically worsened their livelihood, especially for the poor. The paper will examine the Ede adoption of coffee production and the interaction between subsistence and coffee production on a daily basis.