Life has a way forging circles in our lives.
Every path if significant enough will eventually take an elliptical journey back to the beginning and then retrospectively you or someone in your life will point out the obvious which is that your life has taken a full circle.
This has been my Story with coffee.
I grew up and still live in what is the coffee capital of Papua New Guinea, Goroka, the home of the best PNG grown coffee . So all my life I've known and been involved with the coffee at various stages: farming, production, processing and now hopefully exporting. It wasn't like I took an interest, no this is my life, my family's life, my extended family and my community. This is the life I was born into. I didn't have a choice as much as I tried to avoid this.
For instance instead of getting straight into the coffee industry, like I should have,I started a fresh food company. It is a social enterprise based on helping women in rural areas by providing access to markets for their fresh produce and promoting health check ups for their sexual health only led me back to coffee.
A couple of years later I realised more of women’s labour, land and lives were focused on coffee production. In the end, ultimately how we address the inequalities in the coffee industry affects the livelihood of my people.
Our lives revolved around coffee season, commitments to perform customary obligations, marriage ceremonies, settling of family and tribal disputes or any other obligations happened around this time, usually middle of the year, when the extended family and community as a whole could financially afford these activities. Coffee provided a way to alleviate these duties.
Every nuclear family had a plot of coffee trees, and combined with the extended family alot of money flowed in the community. Farmers spent the extra earnings on customary obligations and reinvested them to improve the productivity or quality of their coffee, develop alternative revenue sources.
Saving culture was not part of our culture, land security and ability to intercrop allowed them to ride out the times of low price . When prices were high,numerous trade stores mushroomed sparodically and alcohol related violence too is on a high during this time .
Since 1937, the year of it's introduction into Papua New Guinea, Coffee has become the economic lifeline for over two and half million subsistence farmers in the Highlands and coastal lands of Papua New Guinea. This crop is farmed in 18 of the 22 provinces.
In the `1970’s , my father was one of the young Department of Agriculture and Livestock (DAL) officers who travelled to rural parts of Papua New Guinea to introduce cash crops like coffee, cardamom, cinnamon and pyrethrum saplings as part of extension services for DAL.
In the process create nurseries in these areas to encourage and create the local economy for people. He's been everywhere in these parts of PNG and to this day has like an encyclopedic knowledge about the people, places and issues farmers face. Asked what was the reasoning behind the extensive travel into rural PNG,
'This drive by the newly formed government on the before independence was to ensure that the new nation of Papua New Guinea, had to utilise it's largely agrarian people . Rural Papua New Guineans needed to farm commodities to create economy away from growing traditional crops which didn't really generate commercial value. Agriculture was the way to support this new country'
Coffee was the success story of the commodities introduced in the Highlands especially Eastern Highlands, Simbu and Western Highlands . Coffee took to the rich volcanic soil, the perpetual spring climate and the high altitude. Arabica varietals found favour in these parts, which most of the coffee produced in is the Arabica Blue Mountain Typica, a prized coffee varietal.
The market was always there since the colonisers built large plantations spread across the provinces employing locals as labour and the lifespan of the crop itself which is a tree bearing cherry beans which had a long life span of 15 years.
The task of replanting was minimal and whilst commodities like cinnamon too was a high earning spice, the mechanisms to provide market and extension services over time deteriorated as did all the other crops but coffee. I often wonder that maybe if there were plantations created of that crop there would be a flourishing industry today as well.
To be clear, majority of coffee in the world is produced in plantations on minimal wages.
In Papua New Guinea, majority of the coffee ie 89 percent of coffee produced is by smallholder farmers who own the land and do not pay land rates. Nonetheless, this doesn't shield them from the bottleneck in the coffee industry.
In places where there was good road access, large plantations were set up but in remote places, smallholder farmers grew their own coffee and faced the issue of transporting their coffee to the markets.
However, after independence the plantation system slowly died and much of the plantations were reclaimed by the indigenous landowners from surrounding communities and distributed into small block holders.
Most of these farmers own small plots of land usually less than a hectare with no more than a couple of hundred of trees. Coffee season lasts for about three to four months of the year.
My father's coffee plantation was built on a 27 hectares of communal family land. He spent every free time, money and resources building it in the mid 70's since he was the only formally employed member of his entire extended family. It had a wet factory, a landing area to dry the coffee. It was his life, he had it till the beginning of the 90s when after a family feud he walked off. His extended family went in and divided the plots on the premise that they were looking after my father's coffee.
When I was in primary school and into high school, I spent term 1 holidays usually around March-April picking coffee with other children from my village at my father's old coffee plantation as a picker.
One of my elder cousins who started looking after a block of the plantation would pay us 0.50t/bucket. The arduous labour involved of standing in the cold morning wind, uncommonder six foot coffee trees, with the morning dew dripping on to you whilst you hand pick cherry beans,once your hands are filled you drop it into the bucket and continue reaching further as if fighting the tree for it's cherry.
Once finished you move tree by tree, till the bucket gets too heavy and then we find alternative smaller containers fill it up with picked red cherry beans.
Once the tin bucket is full, my picking partner and I take turns carrying it to the weighing station where itis checked for quality and recorded as a stroke next to my name.We had long days from 6-8 hours depending on how fast we picked that day for the section allocated. It was exhausting work and I can remember was how hungry I was. At the end of the week, it is twenty strokes.
This was a lot of money when your nine years old and your making K10 a week with twenty buckets. Of course, as children, our wages we'd splurge on stationery, soap,clothes and junk food, and then in our naivety gamble away the remaining over card games on the riverbank.
The cherry coffee would be processed in the Wet Mill and then sun dried over the next week or so depending on Sunlight. This coffee now is called parchment coffee. Majority of coffee sold on the market by farmers is this.
The bottleneck of the coffee industry started here. Most farmers to this day earn US$3.20 a day, my earning was US$3.20 for a week, of course this figure changed for more experienced older pickers who had more than twenty strokes. Yet 80 percent of the farmers throughout the coffee world live on this everyday, this was acceptable, this was all we knew.
The Borgen Project, an organisation that fights global poverty says that
'An estimated 25 million smallholder farmers produce the world’s coffee supply. Unfortunately, they earn less than 10 percent per pound of the sale value of their coffee. Combined with the added costs of production, this quickly becomes an unprofitable business'
At the height of the coffee industry, Papua New Guinea farmers produced a million bags of coffee, and has since fluctuated under this figure and not surpassed. Last year the number of bags was 750,000 in 2020, a decline from the previous year. Coffee whilst was the most important crop to be exported it still wasn't at its height.
There were numerous factors affecting this such as the law and order, the bad roads and lack of access to remote coffee communities, the lack of quality coffee being processed: green bean trucks being held up on the highway, parchment coffee buyers getting robbed, cherry coffee being stolen on smallholder blocks.
And then the aging coffee trees in plantations and smallholder blocks, most trees in plantations surpassed forty years meaning less production of cherry beans, the dire need of best practises not implemented by relevant agencies . The list just went on.
With all its problems I never thought of entering the coffee industry but here we are.
One of the places my father did travel to was Marawaka. By then this isolated place had only made contact a few years earlier with the outside world. The only coffee varietal introduced and grown in Marawaka was the Arabica Blue Mountain.
The plateau by which Marawaka sub station settles on altitude of 2300meters, is higher compared to other places and the perfect place for this arabica varietal grown.
Since most of the people couldn't speak Tok Pisin, the creole spoken in Papua New Guinea, extension services, the DAL employed a translator who liased with the community to promote awareness and go between for potential farmers and the DAL extension Officers A nursery was set up in the Marawaka Station, where it became the classroom many farmers started clearing their land and planting this new crop.
Back then, in rural places like Marawaka, the government set about buying commodities and subsidised freight to take out the coffee. This my father was personally responsible for.. The coffee was then sold to coffee exporting houses, the earnings then used to buy more coffee. This was self sufficient. At the time there were no other buyers of parchment coffee and so this was done to support the industry till independent players emerged on the market.
The coffee program was so successful that today, 97 percent of households in the Oburra Wonenara district grow coffee, it's the only source of income for the district. There are more than 26,000 farmers who earn income from this crop. This was in PNG National Research District profile 2010. As government priorities shifted, so did funding and support for this program declined.
Wareh one of our farmers who has witnessed the decline of coffee over the years. She and her husband were model coffee farmers in Marawaka, they opened up their land to be used to make the first nursery to serve the community.
Farmers would travel from all around to get coffee saplings. "There was so much government support before to take the coffee out, the government sent planes men like your father, now we have to walk in the sun, rain and mud through the night and day just to take our coffee out for a measly price. A farmers bags have to be shared among ten to fifteen people over the Mountains to Morobe"
Coffee became the main topic of their conversations, not so much the processing and farming but the logistical nightmare of transportation through tracherous terrain. At the time the impassable road and the sky high freight combined made it impossible to take out coffee.
To add fuel to the fire, a couple of years back the Missionary Aviation Flights withdrew their bigger planes which carried 1.8 tonnes cargo and now only fly the cessnas which carry 900kg at most, even if they did pay for the freight, the cost itself would eat into the profits.
The price for buying parchment coffee would be 80t/kg, compared to other places where it would be about K3.50/kg. Transportation was a major factor of cost but also the deterrent that middlemen weren't looking to engage in that community.
Large haulage of parchment coffee stored in big coffee houses in the hope that one day a buyer will materialise to buy our coffee Never happened. That' was a dream. So year after year tonnes of parchment coffee would be burnt.
Fast forward: In 2018, since I work with women's group through my business, Monpi Coffee Exports, asks me to find women's groups who produce coffee especially in rural areas. My first thought is of Marawaka, since I know people from there who would dearly appreciate this since they produce alot of coffee with no market.
The premise here is to appreciate the hardwork women farmers do to produce this crop since 80 percent of labour ie done by them by offering premium prices. Air Freight would be covered by the Exporter. After this being successfully implemented in November of that year, I realised that there is alot more I could do in Marawaka and other coffee communities.
Overtime extension services into these parts has became non existent and alot of farmers simply do what's been passed on from their parents in terms of how to farm and propogate the crop. The processing of coffee in time became like a game of Chinese whispers where the process lost in translation gave a completely unique flavour of coffee that is Marawaka coffee.
Since getting farmer training by Coffee Industry Corporation out here is difficult I'm left with no option but to do this my self. Of course I'm only going on what I've learnt from my father , my numerous visits to the Coffee Industry Corporation in Goroka, conversations with other experienced coffee farmers and of course research on Google of course.
In the end, our Marawaka coffee was well received overseas with it's distinctive flavours resonant of the original Jamaica Blue Mountain Arabica, with an average Q Grading of 87 out of 100, one of the best coffee out of PNG that year. Not bad for novices.
There's so much potential to develop the coffee industry and coffee culture in Papua New Guinea and it has to come from the grassroots. Once farmers are empowered we can expect the quantity and quality of coffee will increase .
Nonetheless, I also think that in places like Papua New Guinea, businesses have a greater sense of responsibility towards helping the communities that they exist in through social program's of health and education equity . This is something I hope to do more through my social enterprise in the space.
Wareh remembered my father, she was the one who told me that since my father did bring in coffee to Marawaka it was only fitting that I bring coffee out of this place. Something I never really thought of, the circle of life.
Thank you for sharing this. Truelly inspiring in your work. I conquer with you with creating a coffee culture in PNG. I feel all is not lost with women like you at the forefront. Beautiful, keep pressing on.