Word: dak
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...everyone in the area. In the past year, world coffee prices have plummeted. Farmers who in 1999 could get $1.40 per kilo now earn only 40 cents. That doesn't cover production costs. Y Dien, born into the Ede tribe 40 years ago, lives in Ea Brieng, a dusty Dak Lak village. In the hope of finding a better future, he followed government orders to abandon communal living 10 years ago and began growing coffee. Within a few years he was able to buy a television and Vietnam's ultimate status symbol?a Honda motorbike. But these days his extended...
...horizon, and charred tree stumps smolder on the slopes. It may look like a vision of destruction, but Nguyen Van Quyen sees riches rising from the ashes. He's looking not at the felled trees, but at the rows of green bushes next to them. For every fire in Dak Lak province, there is more land to grow coffee and cotton. And Quyen has a hectare to plant. For a young man of 24, with a wife and new baby, it's a dream come true. "We had no money and no land back home," he says. "Here we have...
...highlands even has a bit of the rough-and-tumble of America's West?far more, in fact, than Vietnam's officials would like. In February, thousands of ethnic minorities rampaged through towns in Dak Lak and Gia Lai provinces, apparently enraged by the still-unexplained arrests of two Jarai tribesmen near the Cambodian border. They threw stones, broke windows and in one village reportedly tied up and beat a local official. Witnesses say some shouted for the Kinh to leave. In a country where open opposition is rare and dealt with harshly, the riots amounted to Vietnam's worst...
...white van filled with local police. Officials blocked reporters' access to protest participants and downplayed the troubles, blaming it on Vietnamese exiles bent on toppling the Hanoi regime. "The extremists tried to trick the people, but their scheme did not work," says Nguyen Van Lanh, deputy chairman of the Dak Lak People's Committee. "Now, everything is back to normal...
Perhaps the key to the tension lies in the lush coffee plantations that cover more than 200,000 hectares in Dak Lak. Vietnam has become the world's second-largest exporter of coffee (behind Brazil) in the past decade, and last year it was the No. 1 exporter of the robusta bean. But there's a bleaker story behind the impressive statistics. After the war years, the communist government embarked on a major resettlement campaign: it banned collective land ownership, declared traditional tribal lands state property available for redistribution and forbade nomadic slash-and-burn farming practices, forcing hill tribes...