Lampung set to form coffee cooperative

The administrations of Lampung province and West Lampung regency plan to immediately group 60 percent of coffee farmers in the regions into a cooperative to streamline production.

Lampung Deputy Governor Joko Umar Said said the creation of the new cooperative would boost revenue and production in the industry.

"The coffee cooperative is aimed at boosting production and quality to achieve *specialty coffee' and to increase domestic coffee consumption," he said.

The program, he said, would also encourage entrepreneurship across the industry's entire spectrum, beginning at coffee growers all the way to production factories.

"The cooperative aims to strengthen relations between companies and suppliers, and to improve supplier capacity and spur growth of small enterprises," said Joko.

West Lampung Regent Mukhlis Basri said the regency was home to four districts capable of coffee production. All are fit to host upstream and downstream activities, he said.

"Developing the cooperative is an option to accelerate growth of small and medium enterprises," he said.

"Creating a cooperative is part of the economic process of agglomerating upstream and downstream industries, combining small and medium enterprises and eliminating weaknesses, especially in production and marketing."

Asrian Hendi Caya, an economist at Lampung University, said that before the cooperative could be formed analyses must be carried out to ascertain why certain areas produced higher yields than others.

Another perquisite for the cooperative was to iron out land boundaries to eliminate quarrels over overlapping plantations.

"Developing and enhancing the role and function of the farm group is also important," he said. "This can be done by raising the farming community's status to that of a farming community association in order to improve management."

Lampung is the biggest producer of robusta coffee in Indonesia and covers 163,837 hectares of coffee plantations, including 218,447 farmers.