This World s11e02 Episode Script

1 In Britain we drink almost 500 million cups of coffee every week.
But how much do we really know about where our coffee comes from? I'm on a journey from the fields Flippin' 'eck! to the factories Coffee! to uncover the surprising stories behind our morning pick-me-up.
Chairman Vu, you've got a Bentley! Coffee shops now sell lattes and cappuccinos on almost every British high street, but we've loved cheaper instant coffee for decades.
If you want the best coffee taste you need the best blend of the best beans.
Producing instant coffee to fill our cups is having a huge impact.
There were up to 2,000 wild elephants in Vietnam.
There's now just a few dozen left.
On my journey I discover how our humble cup of coffee has helped transform the fortunes of a nation.
Thank you very much! I worked hard for this! I'm following The Coffee Trail.
I bet if you asked most Brits where their coffee comes from, they wouldn't say here.
I'm in Vietnam.
When you think of coffee, you usually think of Brazil, Jamaica or Colombia.
Oh, goodness me.
The first stop on my coffee trail is Hanoi, the capital city in the north of Vietnam.
I've got to go left here, I think.
Aagh! The streets here, the roads anyway, they're clogged with mad motorcyclists, psychopathic scooter drivers and suicidal cyclists! There are more than 90 million people in Vietnam, and they all seem to be in my way.
Aagh! Aagh! What are you doing, madam? What are you doing?! Vietnam is the number one supplier of coffee to the UK and one of the largest coffee producers in the world.
Oof! Time, I think, for a quick coffee.
Coffee shop, another coffee shop.
There's another one ahead.
There's coffee shops everywhere here.
The Vietnamese grow huge quantities of coffee and now drink it by the gallon.
But they like a very particular brew.
- Ca phe trung.
- Ah, ca phe trung.
- Ca phe trung? - Ah, ca phe trung.
Thank you.
The Vietnamese version of a cappuccino wasn't quite what I was expecting.
I think the joke is on me.
"Go and order a ca phe trung", they said.
"What is a ca phe trung?" is the question I did not ask.
Are there eggs in this coffee? Egg coffee.
Ca phe trung is an egg coffee? Egg coffee.
That's just not right! At least it wasn't another speciality here, coffee beans extracted from weasel droppings.
Eggy coffee.
Mmm.
Ooh! - That's delicious.
- Thank you.
Really good.
I think we need to get on a journey and find out where this Vietnamese coffee's being made.
30 years ago, less than 0.
1% of global coffee production came from Vietnam, but in just a few decades this country has transformed itself into one of the world's leading coffee producers.
Hi.
Can I get a ticket to Dong Ha, please? They drink coffee in the capital, but they don't grow it here.
And to see that, I need to head south.
Thank you.
Oh.
It's here.
Okay.
Oh, it's all right.
Oh, it's got a bit of air conditioning, which, well, to be honest, I'm quite relieved about.
Oh, and a lovely floral display.
I can feel the train powering up underneath me, so we're just about to leave.
It's exciting! I tell you what, they're dead on time.
11 o'clock.
The story of coffee in Vietnam goes back more than 100 years.
Coffee was first introduced by the French in the 19th century.
Vietnam was part of a colony known as French Indochina, which also included Cambodia and Laos.
The French ruled Vietnam for almost 70 years from the late 1800s.
They milked the country for anything they could extract, earning vast fortunes.
Colonial rule could be brutal.
Vietnamese workers toiled in the fields to produce rubber, tea, rice and coffee.
French rule finally came to an end in the 1950s, after a Communist uprising in the north drove them from the country.
The conflict claimed tens of thousands of lives.
In 1954, a peace conference resulted in the country being partitioned, with a Communist government in North Vietnam and an American-backed regime in the South.
But a new and even more bloody war loomed.
I'd travelled 400 miles south from the capital.
It was time to head up into the hills.
Coffee is grown here on a vast scale.
Look there! Coffee! We've arrived in coffee country.
This is one of the areas of Vietnam where they grow our coffee, coffee for us and a few other countries.
The cow is spooked, it's off.
I think you'll find the cow is a bull, Simon.
I was visiting the village of Huong Son.
We've arrived.
The coffee industry in Vietnam now provides a livelihood for millions of people, mostly around small farms like this of just a few acres.
Across the country, farmers like Ho Bon produce a staggering million and a half tonnes of coffee.
It's a key export for the country, and our number one source of coffee in Britain.
These are all the coffee on the plant here, look at this.
This is ready to pick! Let's go, okay! Let's go pick some coffee! Do you take everything off or just the? Okay, so just the red, all right, okay.
What's wrong with that? Oh, he's shaking his head.
That specifically is what you're after.
None of this.
Coffee is one of the most valuable traded goods on Earth.
Globally the industry's worth more than £40 billion.
It's the single most important tropical commodity traded worldwide, accounting for nearly half of total exports of tropical products.
Why do you choose coffee as the crop that you grow? Why not something else? So, coffee is more work, it's harder work but you can make more money from it.
So leave those on.
That's done! That one is done.
So we move in.
This is the coffee fruit, I suppose, and inside is the rather crucial coffee bean.
Tastes like, um, like a sour grape.
But from it you get this.
You can see the line through it, which indicates the coffee.
And you get two, obviously, in one in one fruit.
Bon, do you think I might have a future as one of your coffee pickers? Because I've gone some uses, you know, I'm quite lanky so I can get to the very top of the plant and pick off the cherries, the fruits from there.
That could be a problem, I must admit.
The villagers here wear uniforms left over from what we call the Vietnam War.
It was the conflict that still defines Vietnam today.
In 1965, American combat troops were deployed to support the South Vietnamese government, which was facing a guerrilla campaign by Communist forces.
Their duty will be strictly defensive, but they will shoot back if attacked.
Marines usually do.
Within a few years, America had more than half a million troops on the ground, engaged in a full-scale war.
An hour away from the village is Khe Sanh, once a key American airbase, and the site of one of the most important battles of the Vietnam war.
Van Ngoc Vu is a guide who's been showing visitors around the battlefield for more than ten years.
The US dropped in total about 100,000 tonnes of bombs on the surrounding hills of Khe Sanh, on the North Vietnamese army position, suspected North Vietnamese army position.
That's the most concentrated bombing in the history of warfare.
- The most concentrated period of bombing ever? - Yeah.
So, well, in this valley effectively and on the hills around here? Yeah.
In 1968, Communist North Vietnamese forces attacked the American airbase.
US Marines were cut off, and the US Air Force responded with overwhelming force.
Thousands of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians died, along with hundreds of Americans.
Look at the size of this.
Is this the biggest type of bomb that the Americans dropped on the positions around here? No, not really.
The biggest one is, er, ten times bigger, heavier than this one.
15,000lbs.
Ten times heavier?! Yeah, this one is 1,500lbs.
This was what was pouring out the skies, then, onto the North Vietnamese positions.
Yeah, it was raining.
Raining from the sky, yes.
Coffee planters still have lots of problems from the unexploded bombs around Khe Sanh.
So there are still bombs like this buried in the ground, not quite tick-ticking, but just waiting for a farmer or a tractor with a plough to go over the top of them and potentially set them off.
Yeah, exactly.
Is it safe to walk around here? Are there any unexploded bombs in the ground? It is safe inside the Khe Sanh combat base.
Now, actually, it's a tourist attraction so it was cleared, this is safe.
But if you wander around outside the perimeter of Khe Sanh, it's still dangerous, there's still lots of unexploded land mines, ordnance up there.
- Really? - Yeah.
In Quang Tri Province alone, it's estimated between 80, 83% of land is still being affected with unexploded ordnance.
The war ended nearly 40 years ago, but this area is still desperately poor.
Growing coffee is a major source of income here.
The need to put food on the table drives people to take chances, and working the fields, despite the risks posed by unexploded bombs.
Hello! Hello! Hello! Like most Vietnamese, 18-year-old Ho Ver Nee was born long after the war ended.
Growing coffee is the only thing we do around here.
We grow coffee.
I don't plant other crops like rubber trees.
All of my friends, they grow coffee, so I grow coffee as well.
But for the past year he has been unable to work on his farm.
Can you tell us what happened to you? I was digging in the ground to plant coffee.
I'd gone to work very early and I was clearing away grass and digging holes.
As I was digging a hole there was an explosion.
I was knocked unconscious and I can't remember anything else.
When I came around I realised I was in the hospital.
I kept thinking of my parents.
I was scared I was going to die.
Did you have any idea that there might be explosives or bombs or mines still in the ground in that field? Yes, one person had already been killed.
Why are there people still working there? We're very poor and we don't have enough rice to eat.
I find it astonishing, but more than 100,000 Vietnamese have been killed or injured by unexploded bombs since the end of the conflict.
For rural populations like this, wars rarely end when peace treaties are signed.
Modern weaponry lives long in the soil, claiming thousands of lives globally every year.
Since we left, Y has at last been fitted for a prosthetic leg.
But thousands of other maimed villagers and farmers across Vietnam have yet to receive help.
Following America's defeat and the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, North and South Vietnam were unified under a Communist government.
After years of devastating conflict, the country was in economic ruin.
Coffee was to play a key role in its eventual recovery.
I headed south towards the main coffee growing region.
A few hours into our journey, the weather began to turn.
We'd driven straight into a huge tropical cyclone.
Just stopped by the side of the road because now we really see the power, the destructive force of the cyclone.
The sea is flooding in, inundating people's homes down here.
Cyclone Nari was causing widespread damage in central Vietnam.
16 people had been killed or were missing.
Look at this! 50,000 homes had been destroyed or flooded.
It was the worst cyclone in years.
Look at the tree here! Scientists report the weather here is becoming more extreme and unpredictable.
It's a consequence of global climate change.
The cyclones that are hitting Vietnam are becoming stronger and more powerful.
If you're a coffee farmer, say, this is devastating.
As the storm subsided, I continued south.
My journey had taken me through some of Vietnam's remoter regions, which tourists and TV crews rarely enter, and foreigners who do require extra permits to turn off main roads.
When we'd strayed off our route, we'd been stopped by the police and had to beat a hasty retreat.
Okay, so it looked like the police were going to stop us or even arrest us there, but I think we've just driven off away from them, they're not following.
They might have decided we're just more problems than we're worth.
Vietnam is still an authoritarian, one-party, Communist state.
Political opposition is suppressed and there's little freedom of speech.
Our filming here is being controlled and restricted to a degree and we also have a government-approved minder who's travelling with us.
We're going to have to be careful about what we film, who we talk to and what we ask.
I'd arrived in the central highlands.
The history of coffee production is one of the most sensitive issues here because it involved blanketing this region with coffee farms, human rights abuses and the mass movement of millions of people.
I visited Nguyen Hu Phuong, one of the newcomers.
He has a smallholding of three hectares.
Xin chao.
Phuong? Phuong? Hello, mate, I'm Simon, very nice to meet you.
Is this all your coffee around us? Let's go and have a look.
Thank you.
Goodness me! So you're collecting up the beans now? It's harvest time? Do you want me to hold it? Come on then.
Oh, goodness, no, you haven't finished.
You're going to pull all those berries off.
So, how long have you been here and why did you come? So you're not from this area then? What was this land like when you first arrived here? Was it a coffee farm already? What was the hardest part for you of establishing a life and a farm here? What does your wife think was the toughest part? I want to see the hands, let me see the hands here.
All right, these have done some hard work, haven't they? But look at these! You're doing the hard work, really, aren't you? After the end of the Vietnam War, the Communist government started huge collective farms here.
They weren't a great success.
Nobody on the collective farms had much of an incentive to work hard and corruption was rampant.
People were going hungry and the country wasn't making much money from its crops.
Eventually the government realised they had to do something.
The crucial year is 1986.
That's when the Vietnamese Communist Party had a major meeting.
They realised the economy was in a terrible state and they decided to relax the rules and, among other things, start growing and exporting coffee on a massive scale.
The state-planned collective farms were swept away.
Half a million smallholdings emerged in their place, and in the 1990s, coffee production grew at a staggering 30% per year.
Like that? Oh, I am, I'm so strong! So strong! Phuong and his family are part of the massive migration Flippin' 'eck! .
.
of more than three million people who've come here from other parts of the country to farm coffee and other crops.
The equipment here is still low tech and often creaking.
But small farms like this have been crucial to this country's rapid economic growth.
This is what it's all about.
The next stage from here is to sell this on to a wholesaler.
Coffee, coffee, it's everywhere here.
You look at the communities around here as well and, where they're poor, you've got Look here for example, electricity, satellite dishes on both houses here.
This is a very poor country still, but it was a lot poorer 20, 30 years ago.
Things are changing, things are improving.
In 1994, 60% of Vietnamese lived below the poverty line, now it's less than 10%.
Here we are, I think, judging by the way they're crossing this dual carriageway.
But Vietnam's coffee industry has its problems.
Coffee grown on the small farms is often poor quality, farmers occasionally even bulk up the weight of their coffee sacks by chucking in stones and bolts.
And the deal has been done.
Is that my pay for the day? Thank you very much! THEY LAUGH I worked hard for this! So you've got about £650 here.
It's yours, after all.
And thank you for letting me see this part of the process.
You might be drinking some of farmer Phuong's coffee by now.
Like most Vietnamese farmers, he grows one specific type of bean to make a specific type of coffee.
All of this coffee, in fact almost all of the coffee that's produced in Vietnam is a type of coffee called Robusta.
Robusta coffee, it's quite a hardy plant, but it's quite a low quality one as well and it goes into making instant coffee.
A lot of other countries that produce coffee churn out Arabica coffee, which is a more valuable coffee, it goes to make the more expensive stuff, things like espressos, which you can be charged a fortune for in a high street coffee shop.
But here in Vietnam, they make the cheap stuff.
Instant coffee made largely from Robusta beans accounts for nearly 80% of the coffee we drink in Britain.
Our love affair with the instant stuff really took off in the 1970s and '80s.
Now that's what I call a cup of coffee.
Of course.
It's new Maxwell House.
Ah.
That's why Nescafe is made from a blend of three types of the finest coffee beans in the world and there are about this many beans in every cup.
Red Mountain is freeze dried Communist Vietnam's coffee boom was partly fed by the middle-class aspirations of 1980s Britain.
Mmm, lovely coffee.
Anyway Red Mountain, it's like ground coffee taste without the grind.
When instant coffee landed on supermarket shelves, consumption of coffee rocketed around the world.
In Britain we now drink twice as much of the stuff as we did in the '70s.
One of the best places to see the impact of our coffee boom is the city of Buon Ma Thuot, Vietnam's coffee capital.
Coffee's made some people here very rich.
Chairman Vu, you've got a Bentley! Of course you have a Bentley, you're a rich chap.
You like your cars, Chairman Vu.
So, come on, what cars have you got then? Tell us.
Ten Ferraris?! So, you had many good years when you look at the finances then? You have five Bentleys? Oh, flippin' 'eck! Dang Le Nguyen Vu is known as Vietnam's Coffee King.
He was one of the first to see the potential of the business.
He's made a fortune from exporting beans to countries like Britain, as well as founding his own international chain of coffee shops.
Accompanied by an escort of Jeeps, Chairman Vu, as he's known, showed me around some of his empire.
Goodness me, it's quite the entourage, isn't it? He's even built a multimillion-pound coffee village, a shrine to his beloved bean.
At the centre of the complex are some exhibits highlighting Vu's own very personal philosophy.
What? Who have you got here, Chairman Vu, and why have you got them here? These statues are of my top 100 people.
People who've shaped the history of the world.
Are they people you personally identify with or you would like to be like? Both.
I'd like to be one of the people who changes the world, but also I learn from their core values.
For instance, Napoleon.
His talent in military strategy is the best in the world, no-one can rival him.
If you take coffee, it's a stimulant for the brain.
The rich countries of the world all drink a lot of coffee.
Take your own country-- the moment you shift from drinking coffee to drinking tea, the country slows down.
This is a shocking thing to say! We drink both in Britain.
We love our tea and we drink quite a lot of coffee as well.
Are you suggesting that if we only drank coffee, we would be a more creative country? For me, coffee's a treasure.
Coffee is the heritage of mankind, it's the solution for the future and I don't think that's an exaggeration.
Chairman Vu has big plans.
He wants to take Vietnam's coffee, which we in Britain just use for cheaper, instant coffee, and sell it internationally as a proper, expensive drink in its own right.
It's an acquired taste, but I liked it.
It's really good.
You want us to drink more of this, don't you? You want to try and sell this around the world.
Yes.
We want to bring Vietnamese coffee culture to the world.
So is your plan to try and expand into Europe, into North America, are we going to see Chairman Vu's coffee shops opening in the UK? It isn't going to be easy, but in the next year we want to compete with the big brands like Starbucks.
If we can take on and win over the US market, we can conquer the whole world.
Is that the plan? Conquer the whole world? That's my goal.
Two and a half million people in Vietnam are employed in the coffee industry.
They grow it, they pack it, they ship it.
Selling you coffee feeds their families and helps educate their children.
In many parts of the country, growing coffee is the only industry, but problems are looming.
Dave D'haeze is a Belgian soil and water conservation scientist living in Vietnam, who's an expert on the coffee industry.
Dave, is the way that the Vietnamese are farming coffee at the moment sustainable? I don't think so.
It's a very interesting question because, actually, different to any other project we do in the world, where we are trying to help farmers to increase productivity, here we have to tell farmers, "Please, reduce water amounts, reduce fertiliser amounts and still your production will be one of the highest in the world.
" So they're over-using fertiliser and they're over-using scarce water resources? Absolutely, yes.
Why? Well, there is this traditional belief that you need to do that and nobody has really been trained on how to produce coffee.
Sometimes I'm saying, "Look, every farmer in Vietnam is the researcher of his own plot.
" Oh, really, so there's not enough shared information, almost? They're making it up as they go along and they think, "We want more beans, let's just put kilograms more of fertiliser on them.
" Absolutely, that's how it's going.
Farmers are over-using fertiliser and water and now half of their coffee plants are reaching the end of their life and there's no coordinated plan to replant them.
Wow! Now that is a magnificent sight! That is really spectacular! And those aren't the only threats to the coffee industry here.
We've just been hit by a cyclone, along with a large chunk of the middle of the country, that Vietnam wasn't really expecting.
How is climate change going to affect Vietnam and how is it going to affect the Vietnamese coffee industry, do you think, Dave? I recently spoke to a farmer and he was saying, "Actually, the climate doesn't meet my expectations any more.
" So the climate is becoming really, really more erratic.
So more extreme weather-- hotter hot weather, drier dry weather, wetter wet season? Absolutely, yeah.
We're actually facing the risk that coffee farming will become less viable in economic terms, so farmers will get less income, and will it still be necessary or valuable to grow coffee? That's the big question we are facing over here.
Much of this area was once covered by forest.
The Vietnamese strategy of producing vast quantities of cheap, low quality beans for instant coffee has contributed to its wholesale destruction.
So much of the forest has already been cleared around here, but we're heading to one of the last areas that still gets some form of protection.
Yok Don is Vietnam's biggest national park and is one of the largest protected wildlife areas in southeast Asia.
Primary forest has virtually disappeared in Vietnam.
According to data from global conservation organisation WWF, Vietnam has lost nearly 40,000 square miles of total forest cover since 1973.
The battle to preserve what's left is being fought by a small band of park rangers.
Only just realised the guy there has got an assault rifle.
This is Mr.
Tan here.
- Mr.
Tan? - Yeah? He's the deputy director of the park.
As well as the clearing of forests for agriculture and coffee farming, there's also a major problem here with illegal logging.
Really? All park? All park, from here to there.
And they're poor.
Yeah, they're poor.
Yeah, you can see this boat.
We can check.
I think they're going to check this boat.
Uh-huh? Okay.
Let's look at this! This is such a rare sight now.
Forest! Let's go.
The Vietnamese government has a plan for rapid economic development.
They're expanding agriculture and investing heavily in mining and hydroelectric power, which put the environment under incredible pressure.
These guys really are doing an incredible job.
The rest of the country is trying to devour its natural resources and they're holding the line and trying to protect what's left.
This place is under siege.
On the edge of the forest, we came across evidence of the ongoing threat from coffee farming.
So he needs to do a bit of weeding.
Is this your land, or are you in the park here? And why grow coffee here? Why coffee, rather than any other crop? Goodness me.
This is a complicated situation, you know.
It's a little bit unclear whether this chap is inside the national park or not, but the national park is that-a-way and that-a-way and that-a-way.
He might be.
The rangers have told us that elsewhere around here, farms are nibbling away at the edges of the park.
It's very hard for them to stop, and a couple of times when we've talked about it, they've said, "Well, you know, these people are really poor," and obviously they feel a huge amount of sympathy for them.
I mean, look at this guy saying, "Yeah, I make more money from coffee than I do from anything else.
" But look where he lives.
He's not some wealthy coffee baron.
He's just surviving.
We often imagine that large companies and industry is primarily responsible for damaging or destroying the natural world.
But national parks and wilderness areas around the globe are also under attack like this from hundreds of millions of poor villagers and farmers, who clear a small area of land, grow a few crops and raise a few cattle.
They want to raise their living standards, or often are just trying to feed their families.
The destruction of Vietnam's forests, often to grow our coffee, threatens the survival of countless animal species, including some of the most iconic creatures on earth.
Xin chao.
Bunh Cam.
And you? Muk.
These elephants are domesticated, cared for by their trainers, known as mahouts.
Their wild cousins have almost completely disappeared here.
Muk, why has the number of elephants fallen so dramatically then? At the end of the Vietnam War there were up to 2,000 wild elephants in Vietnam.
There's now just a few dozen left.
Loss of their habitat, including for coffee farms, is one of the biggest problems facing them, which means it's incredibly important that it's protected.
Elephants are just one victim of the environmental catastrophe caused by the clearance of Vietnam's forests.
The Javan rhinoceros was declared extinct here recently and there are no more than 30 tigers left in the entire country.
The Vietnamese government's not doing much and some conservation groups are actually giving up hope of protecting Vietnam's remaining endangered wildlife.
Now here's a sight.
Muk and his family now survive on the money they earn from providing elephant rides to tourists.
Do you normally bring your ellie home with you? Bless her health? Oh, fantastic.
Can we watch? Can we see it? It's not only the environment and wildlife that suffered during Vietnam's great rush for coffee.
Muk and his family are part of an ethnic grouping called the Ede people, one of around 50 minority groups in Vietnam who make up almost 15% of the population.
They're distinguished from the majority Kinh people by religion and heritage.
Some are Christians and some sided with the US during the Vietnam war.
Ever since, they've been treated with suspicion and hostility by the Vietnamese government.
Many hill tribes were forced off their farmland when the majority Kinh people arrived in their millions to grow coffee.
There have been violent protests against what many tribal people have seen as a land grab.
This unverified footage is thought to show protests and a government crackdown.
We know that hundreds of ethnic minority activists have been arrested and imprisoned for campaigning for rights for their people.
Ethnic minorities here have really had a tough time of it.
Any discussion of ethnic minority rights is extremely controversial here.
If I was to start asking people questions about the ethnic minority situation, I would be putting them in danger.
So, to find out more, I need to leave the country.
I flew to Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, several hundred miles away.
Thousands of people from Vietnam's ethnic minorities have fled the country to live in exile abroad.
We managed to arrange a meeting with two men who say they've escaped persecution in Vietnam.
Their identities have been concealed to protect them.
Can you describe to us what happened in ethnic minority areas in Vietnam as millions of farmers from other regions started moving in there? They took our lands away to build a huge state development.
Without land, we had no way to earn a living.
Last October I saw it with my own eyes, hundreds of police and soldiers came and they uprooted all our coffee plants.
They said the land now belonged to the authorities.
Not even the whole village could stop them.
They beat us.
My nephew was beaten unconscious, it was impossible to stop them.
The government confiscated the land.
When they came and uprooted our coffee, we had to fight back.
For that they beat and tortured our people.
It was unfair because that land was passed down to us by our ancestors.
The regime has clamped down hard on signs of dissent.
They arrested me for handing out leaflets.
Leaflets asking young people to come and defend human rights and freedom in Vietnam.
They said, "How dare you?" and six of them started beating me around the head.
They beat me unconscious and I can't remember anything else.
There are still marks on my head.
After that, they threw me into a morgue.
When I came round, they carried on interrogating me.
This man says he was held in prison for six months.
When he was released, he fled the country.
Are you frightened of the Vietnamese government? Do you think you'll ever be able to go home? We can't return.
We're afraid because they have arrested us, interrogated and tortured us.
How can we go back to Vietnam? What would happen to you if you returned home? I would be put in prison until I die.
You're certain of that? Yes, I am.
We're scared because the Vietnamese government is different from other governments.
Once someone is charged with a crime they are imprisoned, locked up.
The government uses any means to make sure they stay in jail for ever.
And why would they imprison you? On what grounds and for what crimes? Opposing them is an offence, that's why they arrest us.
The international group Human Rights Watch has described Vietnam's human rights record as atrocious and says conditions there are getting worse.
There is widespread press censorship and across the country people who question or challenge the regime face harassment, jail and torture.
It seems clear to me that Vietnam does not get the attention that it deserves and would be warranted, frankly, for the scale of human rights issues and abuses that are happening there.
I have a view, or at least I had a view before starting this journey, of Vietnam as being a poor but fairly friendly and welcoming country which was an ideal place for a backpacker holiday.
I'm not suggesting it's not, but I think you've got to see the political aspect as well and the scale of the abuses that are happening there and that are largely hidden from international view and international attention.
The end of the coffee trail took me to the south of Vietnam.
Ho Chi Minh City, which used to be called Saigon, is Vietnam's biggest and most modern city.
Nearby is the destination for many of Vietnam's coffee beans, a Nestle factory and warehouse.
Wow, this place is huge.
Nestle's the world's largest food company.
It supplies the UK with more than half our instant coffee.
Their manager here is Nakle Kattan.
This coffee is coming from what we call upcountry.
A large proportion of Vietnam's coffee bean harvest ends up in Nestle's warehouses.
In fact, just a few giant multinational companies dominate the global instant coffee industry.
Here it's Nestle that makes big profits by turning the beans into Nescafe.
The process begins by filtering out the impurities.
Wow.
It's a mass of piping that to me, of course, means absolutely nothing, but to the guv'nor here, there's a purpose to everything, of course.
After that, the beans are then roasted in a huge drum.
Yeah, this is the coffee that you've just seen before, it came through the roaster and now it is roasted and going to the extraction.
Right, and the extraction bit is the secret bit? Yeah.
In the extractions, we extract first the solid, but also this aroma, you know, of Nescafe, when you open your jar.
But that's the secret bit of your process that we can't see, isn't it? The Nescafe formula is a closely guarded secret and it's hugely lucrative.
The instant coffee industry is worth billions every year, but very little of that profit stays in the country, which isn't great for Vietnam.
Although Vietnam is one of the world's biggest coffee producers, nobody seems to know about it.
When you think about it, whoever asks for a cup of Vietnamese coffee? Starbucks, even Starbucks here in Vietnam, doesn't actually promote and market coffee from Vietnam the way it does coffee from other coffee-producing countries.
Again, not great for Vietnam.
Will Frith is a Vietnamese-American coffee consultant who's moved here to get involved in the national coffee industry.
The big global coffee chains don't seem to promote and market Vietnamese coffee the way they do coffee from other coffee-producing countries.
- Right.
- What's going on? In terms of the coffee industry here, they're aiming for quantity, which necessarily drives the quality down.
Will wants to encourage Vietnamese farmers to switch from growing low quality instant coffee to planting the more valuable beans that go into expensive cappuccinos and espressos.
He thinks the country has no choice.
If they don't, I'm afraid that a lot of the signs are pointing towards complete failure.
Is complete failure of the industry actually a possibility? Yes.
We're entering sort of a perfect storm of conditions right now where the soil is being sucked dry by monoculture.
So, the soil is basically becoming exhausted, knackered almost, it's having the goodness sucked out of it.
Absolutely, and to compound the problem there's climate change to think about.
And I've actually seen some models that essentially wipes out more than half of the growing regions here.
And that would just be horrific for farmers here.
It would be devastating.
It would be devastating for more than just farmers, you've got processors and traders and people whose livelihoods depend directly on the coffee industry.
The next day, I headed to the country's biggest port.
Thousands of tonnes of coffee leave Vietnam from here and heads off across the sea to Europe and America.
I've come to the end of the coffee trail.
Clearly, this country has come a long way economically in the last few decades, but they have got a lot further to go.
They've got to diversify their economy, they've got to move on from producing massive quantities of one type of low quality, low value coffee.
At the moment, the situation's quite good for us because we get a cheap cup of coffee, but it's not so good for the environment here in Vietnam, and actually in the long term it's not that great for Vietnam's farmers either.
Our humble cup of instant coffee is linked to some of Vietnam's greatest political problems and human rights abuses.
But it's also helped to create modern Vietnam, providing jobs for huge numbers of people and helping to lift this country from the ashes of war.
January 26th, 2014