VIETNAM AND THE EAST GERMAN COFFEE CRISIS @museum.de

The coffee substitute manufactory "Kathreiner's Malzkaffeefabriken" in Magdeburg was expropriated after the Second World War and subsequently run by the Association of Consumer Cooperatives. But in 1954, the Soviet Union stopped supplying coffee to East Germany. Now, the country had to buy its own green coffee on the world market. Those coffee beans were then roasted at the former Kathreiner factory in Magdeburg. The "Mona" and "Rondo" labels, marketed under the umbrella of the Röstfein brand, were in short supply and expensive as a result.

Due to the oil crisis and a failed harvest in the world’s premier coffee-growing country Brazil, in 1976 coffee prices spiked. And because East Germany was short of foreign currency, it was only able to buy a much smaller quantity of green coffee.

The initial solution was to discontinue production of the lowest-priced coffee brand, called Kosta. Then a new blend with a high grain content of 50 per cent was launched under the Kaffeemix label. When, in a further step, pea flour was added to the Kaffeemix blend, people’s coffee filters clogged up, and there were hundreds of complaints about the poor quality of the coffee.

The East German government realised that it needed its own supply of green coffee. Vietnam was considered as potentially able to supply a sufficient quantity – though hardly any coffee had ever been grown there. So East Germany started providing agricultural training in Vietnam. The country supplied machinery and equipment, irrigation systems and a hydro-electric power plant to supply the required electricity. 10,000 resettled Vietnamese workers were provided with accommodation and benefits. In return, East Germany was to receive half of Vietnam's coffee crop for a period of twenty years. But coffee-growing takes time, and the first coffee harvest from Vietnam wasn’t expected until 1990. A large silo had already been built for that Vietnamese coffee in Halle an der Saale. But then came the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Vietnam was able to carry on growing coffee with loans from the World Bank.

Due to the climate and the low-lying growing regions, the country was growing Robusta coffees, which are less aromatic and fetch very low prices on the world market. Vietnam rose to become the world’s largest Robusta producer and is now the second largest coffee producer overall after Brazil.