Global Value Chains and Creating Shared Value in Vietnamese Coffee Frontier

Abstract

The main aim of the research attempts to identify value relations appropriated and realized in the coffee frontier of Vietnam by investigating the ways in which it is integrated into coffee global value chains driven by multinational companies, and to provide some implications of the integration of the frontier into sustainable coffee global value chains for creating shared value in Dak Lak, Vietnam. Recently Dak Lak has gone through the transition of value relations from exploitative value chains based upon conventional coffee production into shared value chains relied upon the production of sustainable or certified coffee in Dak Lak. The transition has been expected to result in sustainability in the creation of value by enhancing regional competitive advantages and regional bargaining power in global value chains driven by multinational companies. However, the reality has shown the intensification of hierarchical profits allocation among stakeholders such as farmer, middlemen, and multinational companies in the region. The main reasons for this could be found in two perspectives. Firstly, the formation of exclusive relations among farmers, middlemen, and processors has led to stakeholders to secure market, but resulted in the intensification of hierarchy among them in global value chain, because multinational companies could control indirectly over the farming system through exclusive middlemen. Secondly, social and ecological costs imputed by multinational companies to coffee farmers in the name of creating shared value has deteriorated the economic profits of stakeholders such as farmers and middlemen. As a result, it has led to the configuration of systematically hierarchical and subordinated global value chain in Dak Lak.