Development through dispossession: coffee as mutual aid between Vietnam and East Germany

Following the end of anticolonial warfare in Vietnam, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) joined efforts by the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) to rebuild the devastated country through construction of new industry and infrastructure. Modernisation projects carried out by the GDR left an enduring imprint on the Vietnamese landscape, serving as evidence of its goodwill practices and solidarity with liberation struggles in the Global South. Underlying such development imperatives, however, were civilizing logics that exacerbated social inequalities and unsettled claims to flattened hierarchies. This article uses the example of a ‘mutually beneficial’ coffee project between Vietnam and East Germany in the 1980s to ask: whose interests did mutual aid serve? It argues that CMEA objectives to modernise Vietnam and assist with its post-war recovery paid insufficient attention to the interests of its indigenous population, resulting in unintended harms, also to biodiversity.