“I came to this land empty-handed,” said Nguyen Van Thanh, a 54-year-old who’s planted pepper for the past 14 years in Dak Lak province. “Income from pepper allowed me to provide for my family, buy motorbikes, build and renovate my home.”
Thanh now harvests about 4.5 to 5 metric tons a year on his 1.5 hectare (3.7 acre) plot in the Central Highlands. He sells the pepper for about 190,000 dong ($8.90) a kilogram, or more than nine times his production costs