Coffee Commercialization in the Bolaven Plateau in the Southern of Lao PDR

Abstract

Coffee commercialization is a part of agricultural commercialization, which is recently tended to be increasingly integrated into the national, regional, and global market to increase the export earnings. In this context, coffee commercialization is discoursed in pertinent to six perspectives involving agricultural commercialization, the linkage of agriculture and commercialization, new thinking of agricultural commercialization, productive resources for coffee commercialization, process of coffee commercialization, and impact of coffee commercialization. Agricultural commercialization has to reconstruct of relation to food security and gender role in agricultural commercialization. The implication of empirical analysis of FATE research project in the Southern of Lao PDR highlights three novel features of coffee commercialization including productive resources for coffee commercialization, process of coffee commercialization, and impact of coffee commercialization. The primary conditions required for coffee commercialization are productive resources including land, capital, and labor. The coffee commercialization is essentially processing through plantation, nurturing, harvesting, and marketing. The commercialization provides livelihood impact arena for local farmers' food security and employment opportunities including for women and creates compact gender division of labor in different processes of coffee commercialization.