In August 2020, I was finishing my master's degree in Mediterranean Forestry. I was eager to move from textbooks to the real world, so I applied for a volunteer placement with an EU programme focused on forests. I was interviewed and nearly assigned to Ghana. Then came an unexpected question at the end of the panel: would I consider Vietnam instead?
I said yes.
A month later the placement was confirmed. Then COVID hit. The programme was suspended. Life moved on in the slow, uncertain way it did for everyone during that period.
About a year later, an email arrived. The programme was back. Vietnam was still on the table. It was the final year of funding, the last chance to go. At the time I was working on short-term research contracts at the Forest Department of the University of Lisbon. I negotiated a remote arrangement and started packing.
On July 15, 2022, I boarded a plane to Hanoi with only a vague idea of what was waiting for me. I had no idea that coffee would become the thread connecting everything.
The Phrase That Defined the Whole Project
Once I arrived in Hanoi and the details of our assignment became clear, one of my fellow volunteers, a Spanish colleague who had expected something more directly focused on conservation, summed up his frustration in five words: "Coffee is not forest."
He was not wrong, technically. But that phrase captured exactly the tension at the heart of everything we were there to study. A few weeks later, he left the project. The contradiction was too much for him to sit with.
I stayed. And I kept thinking about what he said.
Vietnam and the Scale of Coffee
Before I arrived, I knew coffee as a drink. After a few weeks in Hanoi, I began to understand it as something far more complicated, a global commodity that shapes the lives and livelihoods of millions of smallholder farmers across the tropics, and a crop whose expanding footprint is quietly rewriting landscapes across entire regions.
Vietnam is the second-largest coffee producer in the world, behind only Brazil. Most of that production is Robusta, grown in the lowland Central Highlands. But in the cooler, higher-altitude mountains of the northwest, Arabica thrives, and that is where our work was focused.
The district of Thuan Chau in Son La Province had recently undergone a significant shift. Farmers who had grown up cultivating subsistence crops, upland rice, maize, cassava, were pivoting to coffee, encouraged by regional policies promoting the switch as a path toward better income. The transformation was rapid. And it came with consequences that nobody had fully mapped yet.
Into the Mountains
After two months working from the Hanoi office, we finally made it into the field. In late September 2022, our team headed north and west into the mountains of Northwest Vietnam. The landscape shifted as we climbed, valleys giving way to steep slopes, small villages appearing between patches of woodland and terraced farmland.
In Thuan Chau, we spoke with farmers directly. We visited local institutions. We sat with women who had taken out loans to start coffee production. We met bank representatives who explained how demand for agricultural credit had grown alongside the expansion of coffee. We talked with environmental officials about land use policy and what the district was trying to become.
The picture that emerged was complicated and genuinely human. These were not abstract statistics. They were families making real decisions about their land and their future under real economic pressure.
The Detail That Stayed With Me
On the drive back to Hanoi, one thing kept turning over in my mind. The farmers we had spent weeks talking to, the people growing this coffee on steep hillsides, managing the soil, tending the plants, watching the yields, had never actually tasted it.
Not once.
In Hanoi, coffee is a way of life. It is on every street corner, in every alley, on rooftops and in basements. The menus are extraordinary, egg coffee, coconut coffee, condensed milk iced coffee, and dozens more inventions I had never seen anywhere in Europe. Compared to Hanoi, even the best coffee shops in Lisbon felt unimaginative.
And yet, a few hundred kilometres away, in the mountains where the beans were being grown, the people who planted and harvested them had no connection to the drink itself. Their relationship with coffee was entirely economic. A crop. A commodity. A path, they hoped, toward something better than subsistence.
That disconnect told me more about the global food system than anything I had read in a research paper.
What the Data Showed from Above
Back in Hanoi, I turned to the tools I knew best. My background is in remote sensing, using satellite imagery to study how landscapes change over time. I pulled together tree canopy cover data for Thuan Chau District covering the years 2000 to 2021, using a dataset developed by the Global Land Analysis and Discovery Lab at the University of Maryland.
The patterns were instructive. Between 2011 and 2015, tree cover across both Son La Province and Thuan Chau declined steadily, tracking the boom in maize cultivation during that period. Then, from 2015 onward, overall tree cover began to recover, likely linked to the policy shift promoting coffee and fruit cultivation within more diverse farming systems.
But the picture was not straightforwardly positive. While overall canopy cover increased, the share of land carrying very dense tree cover actually fell after 2015. Some of the new coffee planting appeared to be happening on previously forested land. Canopy cover was growing in one sense while forest quality was shrinking in another. The numbers told a story that was neither simple nor reassuring.
Where Agroforestry Comes In
The full-sun monoculture model of coffee farming, clear the land, plant in rows, maximise yield, is the version causing the most damage. Soil erodes on steep slopes. Nutrients deplete quickly. Farmers reach for chemical fertilisers to compensate, or clear more land when yields fall. It is a cycle that works in the short term and damages the land over time.
Agroforestry offers a different approach. Integrating shade trees into coffee farms improves soil health, reduces erosion, and makes crops more resilient to the kind of extreme weather events that are becoming more frequent and severe. Research consistently shows that coffee grown within diverse tree systems supports greater biodiversity, provides farmers with additional income from timber and fruit, and buffers against the price swings that make pure commodity farming so precarious.
Many of the farmers in Thuan Chau already understood parts of this intuitively. They valued trees for shade and wind protection. What they often lacked was technical guidance, which species to plant alongside coffee, how to manage the shade canopy without reducing yields, how the approach could be certified in ways that open access to higher-value markets.
That last point matters more than it might seem. Vietnam's coffee ambition is not simply to grow more, it is to reach high-value markets in Europe and North America that now require documented sustainability standards. If Thuan Chau can demonstrate that coffee expansion there not only avoids deforestation but actively builds tree cover and biodiversity, it becomes a fundamentally more competitive product. The environmental argument and the economic argument point in the same direction.
What I Think About Now When I Drink Coffee
I came back from Vietnam with a different relationship to the cup in front of me every morning.
Coffee connects a remarkable number of things: the slope of a hillside in Northwest Vietnam, a farmer's decision about whether to plant shade trees this season, a trade policy in Brussels, a consumer choosing between two bags on a supermarket shelf. Most of those connections are invisible from where most of us sit.
My Spanish colleague was right that coffee is not forest. But after everything I saw and studied and sat with in Thuan Chau, I think the more honest version of that statement is: coffee does not have to be the enemy of forest either.
Whether it becomes part of the solution depends on choices being made right now, by farmers, by policymakers, by certification bodies, and by everyone who buys a bag of beans and has, until now, never had to think too hard about where it came from.