Coffee Industry Revitalizes Rural Areas in Southwest China

A plant in rural Yunnan Province, southwestern China, is immersed in rich, refreshing coffee aroma, with bags of specialty coffee beans rolling off its two production lines.

The plant, in Dehong Dai and Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture, was built from scratch and completed within less than three months, said Deng Ziyang, chairman of the Dehong Laihui Coffee Bean Co., Ltd.

"The quality of Dehong coffee beans is very good," Deng noted.

With a maturing industry chain and supporting measures, Dehong is hosting a growing number of coffee-making companies. Blacksoft is one of them.

Shan Yunhui, head of the company, said that Dehong has a sound climate for coffee production.

"The combination of a strong industrial base and a professional scientific research team here makes it very convenient for us to work on new products," Shan added.

Further efforts are being made to unleash growth potential and boost sustainable development. In a coffee research facility at the Dehong Tropical Agriculture Research Institute of Yunnan, towering rubber trees are interplanted with multiple varieties of coffee plants.

"Our institute has been conducting research on coffee plantations since 1967, and has so far collected and preserved more than 900 coffee germplasm resources," said Ma Guanrun, deputy director of the institute's coffee research center.

"Taking advantage of these resources, we've selected and developed a number of new coffee varieties and made new breakthroughs in cultivating high-yield and rust disease-resistant varieties," Ma said, adding their efforts have helped raise the yield of local coffee beans by between 46 and 60 percent, while their technology has been applied on more than 1 million mu (about 66,670 hectares) of coffee farms in Yunnan.

In 2022, the coffee planting area in Dehong had reached 74,000 mu, producing a total of 11,100 tonnes of coffee beans and an industrial output value of 3.08 billion yuan (about 433.7 million U.S. dollars).

The burgeoning coffee industry has also spawned upscale coffeehouses, which are attracting a stream of coffeeholics and inquisitive tourists.

"The view here is nice with great coffee on offer. It's a pleasant place to take a rest," said Ms. Zhang, a tourist from Shanghai, while sipping a cup of coffee.