Vietnam
Dr. Dave D’haeze started his career in Vietnam in 1998 when coffee expansion was in full swing. In 2004 he got a PhD at the Catholic University Leuven for his ground-breaking research towards optimization of irrigation efficiency for Robusta coffee. That same year, he joined the Foundation Hanns R. Neumann Stiftung (HRNS), where he has been working as Regional Manager Asia Pacific in charge of designing and implementing various Public-Private Partnership programs to promote sustainable coffee production. Dr. D’haeze is the author of the National Coffee Sector Program vision 2020 for Vietnam and published a manual on Good Agricultural Practices for Robusta, which has been sold at 60,000 copies and is currently available as a multilingual smartphone application. In 2018, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) awarded Dr. D’haeze a medal for his contributions to the Vietnamese agricultural sector. Since 2019, Dr. D’haeze is the Country Representative Sustainable Coffee for Tchibo in Vietnam. Passionate about coffee, he also supports coffee initiatives globally as freelancer. Dr. D’haeze is a member of ASEAN Coffee Federation since 2013.