Before you could set foot onto the territory of Ngo Van Tien’s pepper farm, you had to trot through a patch of powdered white quicklime laid out by the owner at the trellis gate. One  reason was to ensure all possible harmful germs carried on visitors’ soles were wiped off – they might contaminate the organic farm. The other was to create a biological fence that keeps dirt away. “It was raining the other day,” explained Tien, a slender man with a constant wide grin hung above his big beard, “flooding the dirt road outside. We were afraid the water might sweep in with all cow dung and piss and god-knows-what from the path.” 

“Since we cannot arm the vines with pesticides and herbicides,” Tien added, “prevention is better than a cure.”

Sitting 800m above sea level in Nam Yang in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, his leafy peppercorn cluster resembles a lush oasis from above, surrounded  by nothing but red dusty trails and abandoned land. Although the region has been known as a major source of Vietnam’s world-leading spice trade for the last few decades, Tien’s 6ha spread is among the recent few that have ventured into organic farming. It was a chilly autumn day on the hills, and the man in his 50swas leading a group of  business partners from Ho Chi Minh City-based Vietpepper company for a tour of his green sacred plantation. He laughed and nodded as Hoai Thuong, the company’s domestic market leader and a regular visitor to the farm pointed at the chopped goat weed she was stepping past on the ground, suggesting it can be a great natural fertiliser for the plants. The collaboration they have been cultivating for the past four years has lately sprung new hope for Vietnam’s struggling pepper industry, which nose-dives whenever global markets’ prices drop.

It all started in 2016, when Tien attended a few spice conferences where leading experts repeatedly warned that if Vietnam continued its current chemical-soaked path, by 2025 its peppers might no longer be accepted globally. Before the grim projection, peppers had had an impressive run in his home region. First introduced to the fertile basalt soil in the late 1970s, amid the whirling global craze for the flavourful seeds, the vines quickly proliferated to nearly 18,000ha across Central Highlands provinces. Dubbed the world’s most-used spice, together with salt, pepper then promised fortunes to the growers. When the price reached peaks in the 90s and 2000s, it made local farmers wealthy and enlivened the war-torn, poverty-stricken land. Since 2001, when Vietnam took over the world’s leading position of the trade, the spice export has shot up by 700%. The revenue for the country has risen from USD90 million to USD758.8 million in 2018, according to a report by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.

The race to churn out as much “black gold” as possible, however, has thrown its growers into the rabbit hole of agricultural chemical dependence, as well as endless and unpredictable cycles of price drops. The most recent price drop was underway when Hoai Thuong visited recently: after the record year of 2016 when Vietnam's pepper export turnover exceeded USD1.4 billion, global pepper prices fell nonstop in the years that followed.

“By then I had been considered a pioneering grower in the province,” recalled Tien, a farmer with decades of experience under his belt. Aside from the recent organic lot, he owns dozens of hectares more of regular pepper plantations in Gia Lai province. “Local and national agriculture authorities contacted me and suggested I piloted a piece of my land for chemical-free methods to find an exit for the current situation.”

Tien gathered with a group of over 60 other growers for the endeavor in 2016, pulling together fresh farmland in Nam Yang commune, a 30 minute drive away from his house in Pleiku City. Traditionally, pepper vines with the help of various pesticides can climb the tall concrete poles within only a few months, wrapping the trunks with lush leaves. Come the first monsoon rains, luxuriant spikes of berries pop up. One pepper trunk could blossom eight kilograms of fresh seeds. But without the chemical pumps, the yield fell short. “Everyone was hesitant,” Tien said, “seeing vines’ growth slowed and the output halved or even less.”

However, chemical-free pepper always fetches a higher price and offers more bumper crops throughout its lifespan. While others sell the “normal” pepper for VND55,000 a kilogram, theirs could be offered at the buying price of VND100,000. And Tien noted harvest in traditional farms, including his, usually thrives at first then plummets from the third year on, while it is the opposite with organic vines. And as long as their organic pepper can find a reliable trader, “We then would not have to worry about the output,” he said. In 2018, his group of farmers and Vietpepper company “found each other.”

The company, which was only established in 2012 – deemed a late arrival to the game – identified from the start that its focus would lie in the niche market of chemical-free peppers. “We are well aware how small we are as a business in this immense trade,” Thuong said of the company with dozens of staff, “so it is also part of our strategy to avoid going head to head with them and embark on a narrow road that few have led.” More than a business move, the force behind the organic choice also came from a personal motivation as well. Vietpepper’s founder Hua Thi Thuy Lien is Central Highlands-born herself, and “has always been concerned about the sustainability of her homeland’s cash-cow industry,” Thuong said.

Few commodity traders have so far bet on this organic gamble in Vietnam. “Its production zones are very small and fragmented,” she said, “tiny patches with only a few hectares each, while its technique and control processes are super demanding.” To find farming partners, the company’s staff look for and work through community leaders, who are already well respected among local farmers and who will later invite more farmers to join them if the partnership goes well. That was how they met Tien and his farmer group.

Trust is a two-way street, and the company also has had to work hard to recruit farmers and keep them from dropping out. “There have been big traders who are willing to pay to get the farms certified as organic producers, but when the prices fall, they would leave farmers hung out to dry,” Thuong said. “What Vietpepper has been trying to do is to commit to the purchase at a higher price than regular peppers even when the market drops.”  

But to keep things moving in the longer haul, high purchase prices alone are not enough in the chaotic industry. “To build trust and commitment, we later figured out that we needed to involve ourselves more on the ground,” Thuong said. The “young and small company” learnt to develop stronger communications with their farming partners, like offering them insights on the growing market for organic products, or introducing new organic farming practices from around the world. It also goes an extra mile to help farms in its system buy imported organic fertiliser at the wholesale price, which “helps slash the cost a lot,” according to a farmer who works with Vietpepper. 

“At first we did those somewhat as a good deed,” Thuong said. “And then coaching sessions by the Enterprising for Development (EFD) program let us realise that supporting our farmers helps our business in the long run, too, by letting them know we are here to stay with them,” she said of the technical assistance they have received since 2019. The “companionship” strategy as they call it has become a pillar of the company’s growth strategy. The yield currently ranges from two tonnes a hectare to seven tonnes, depending on the growers’ skills and the soil. There are other Control Union-certified cooperatives and small-holders from which Vietpepper gathers  produce, too, to ensure a steady flow of goods. Vietpepper currently counts a total of 50ha of organic and 500ha of regular pepper growing land scattered in the Central Highlands’ provinces of Dak Lak and Gia Lai.  

On its chic-looking website, Vietpepper now provides two varieties of peppers: regular and organic. The former is guaranteed to meet basic standards for the European markets,  and are also dubbed“clean” peppers, produced by farms during their transition to organic practices. “That is also our way to support our producers when they start to embark on this path,” Thuong said. Altogether the company pushes out nearly 200 tonnes of organic pepper and 1500 tonnes of regular pepper to the market. And they are selling more than just pepper. Their product line recently has been expanded to include a variety of Vietnamese traditional spices such as cassia, star anise, ginger, and cardamom sourced from the country’s northern region. Their organic growers in the Central Highlands are also experimenting with planting turmeric rows between the pepper lines. They hope this will help them raise their incomes while avoiding putting all their eggs in one basket, Thuong said.

After being processed in a Vietpepper factory in Ho Chi Minh City, the harvests go all over the world: Parts are sent out as OEM (original equipment manufacturer) products to wholesalers in other countries like the U.S. and Europe, bottled and sold on supermarket shelves or online ones, or sent to the mill of local food processors as big as the CP Vietnam Corporation (CP). This year the company will try traditional markets and grocery stores.

The company said OEM channels have helped them negotiate high selling prices, although that means their pepper bottles are labeled with others’ brand names, with only a Product of Vietnam line on the bottle. “We are small and still little-known,” Thuong said. “The company understands that we need them to push out our farmers’ yield and that those are the first steps for a longer plan.” The first market that they entered as Vietpepper was Japan, and the next will be Thailand via the Central Group supermarket network. Plus, multiple channels have helped the small player to stay in the game when the Covid-19 pandemic and its effects swept through. Their airport store distribution branch was struck badly, but the online one thrived, helping the rest stay afloat.

Starting out as an export business, the company realised it was even more challenging to expand their products domestically. “I had to explain to countless buying directors why clean pepper matters,” Thuong who is in charge of Vietpepper’s domestic market, said, “as they would say something like, ‘I don’t think peppers need to be organic, too.’” Her strategy back then was to tell them the effects not only on consumers’ health, but also on the growers’, and how it might help the industry steer away from the common, boom-and-bust path of the cheap agricultural trade as a whole. Now their bottles of wholegrain and ground black and white peppers can be found on shelves from local retailers as big as LotteMart and CoopMart to convenience store chains like B’smart. Vietpepper is now also partnering with a few companies from the EFD program to expand their reach. “One of the takeaways from the training courses was we got to join a network of reliable companies, some of which we are now working with as either our suppliers or clients,” Thuong said. From a young business journeying off the beaten path, Vietpepper has now become Vietnam’s first home-grown company that produces and exports organic pepper. 

After a few years navigating the dubious, “to-trust-or-not-to-trust” organic produce trade, the company concluded that what has kept them standing firmly in the crowded spice industry is the bonds they have nurtured over time with their growers. Vietpepper also hires the adult children of their partner farmers, either working in the headquarters and factory in Ho Chi Minh City or in their own hometown. And once a year they have what is called a give-back trip to a few villages where their farms are located, offering scholarships and gifts to local students. “It is also one of our ways to show them how the company is committed to the community,” said Thuong, on the way to a pepper-growing commune in Ea H’leo District, Dak Lak province, at the end of 2020. Beside Tien and his Nam Yang farmers group, their network of partners has now reached over 140 households in Dak Lak and Gia Lai provinces.

Sitting in a car loaded with gifts, Thuong held out her phone. On the screen was a photo taken of a handwritten letter. “Thank you for the bicycle you gifted me last year,” wrote Quoc Tri, a fifth-grader in Ea H’Leo. “I ride it every day to school and I am really happy with it.” He is said to have been walking kilometres to class before he got the bike. “I hope the company will grow further so you can do more to help the community like this.”

Ngo Van Tien would also like to see his two-year-old partnership with the Ho Chi Minh City-based company go far. In his living room, with walls covered with awards and commendations, Tien described in detail his pursuit in growing “clean pepper.” “It is still something new to us and we are still learning,” he said with a big grin. “It is great to have a companion to poke around with.”

Phuong Nhung

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