24. November 2026

Scaling living income: Integrating the concept into regional development policy and the case of the Vietnamese coffee sector

There are many ways to move towards a living income through policy levers.  One of these is by integrating living income into rural development policy.  A prominent example of this is the development of Vietnam’s coffee sector.

Vietnam is the world’s 2nd largest coffee exporter, with smallholders earning relatively high incomes.  This is the result of a steady development of the coffee sector over several decades.  This case describes how it came about, and yields valuable lessons for living income practitioners in other contexts.

Decades of strong government-led development in combination with a willingness of farmers to employ coffee production as a path to prosperity developed a strong and globally dominant Vietnamese coffee sector.  The focus on high-volume Robusta (not Arabica) instead of quality allowed the country to leverages its beneficial natural conditions for Robusta in the Central highlands.  Finally, reasonable levels of political stability and government effectiveness contributed to relatively high incomes for coffee farming households.

This case yielded several lessons for policy-oriented living income practitioners, including the need to:

  • Accept (living) income goals can be achieved without the concept of a living income and find other ‘hooks’
  • Tailor the living income agenda to the long-term domestic objectives of the country at stake
  • Leverage long-term, sustained government support for transformative change – in combination with public-private partnerships – at landscape or jurisdictional level
  • Avoid ‘living income tunnel vision’: take a multidimensional lens towards income improvements, environmental, and socioeconomic interests
  • Do not only advocate for the creation of policies – proper execution is at least as critical.

In this workshop, we will unpack these lessons and see how they can be translated to similar initiatives, as well as share other examples of capacity building in producer countries.

This is the third in a three-part series exploring living income policy case studies. Register for other two sessions on the Living Income Differential (LID) in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana and integrating the living income into the CSDDD. 

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