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Hello, welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Michael Rossi. I'm taking you back to

I'm taking you back to 1980 when East Germany made a deal with

fellow Communist state Vietnam to plant thousands of coffee trees.

In return for helping Vietnam create an industry, East Germany would get a large percentage of all those lovely coffee beans.

I've been speaking to Siegfried-Calfos, the East German official whose job it was to create plantations in Vietnam starting from

scratch.

I was very surprised and I had no idea how it would work or how long the project would be or indeed how demanding it would be.

As it turned out, it was a lot of work. More of that in a moment, but why the agreement with Vietnam?

East Germany had a planned economy and that meant it was sometimes hard to get a hold of things.

But one of the pleasures for East Germans was a steaming cup of hot coffee and some would say they were

obsessed with it.

Imported goods such as coffee had to be paid for in foreign currency.

A failed harvest in the late 1970s in Brazil, then and still the world's biggest coffee exporter meant a massive rise in prices.

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