Indonesia, the world’s fourth-largest coffee producer, is promoting good farming practices in coffee production to help farmers benefit from the caffeine craze among millennials that has swept almost all major cities in the country.

A number of NGOs such as the Specialty Coffee Association of Indonesia (SCAI) and Sustainable Coffee Platform of Indonesia (SCOPI) have been actively involved in promoting good farming practices in the production of coffee in several parts of Indonesia.

“We need to teach our coffee growers good agricultural practices to increase their productivity and expand their market,” SCAI advisory board chairperson Delima Hasri Azahari Darmawan said in Jakarta on Aug. 15.

She said the productivity of Indonesia’s coffee plantations was among the lowest compared to those of other major producers such as Brazil and Vietnam because the coffee plantations in the country still mostly used traditional farming methods.

According to the Association of Indonesian Coffee Exporters (AEKI), Indonesia produced 674,636 tons of coffee in 2018, or about 7 percent of the world production. About 75 percent of Indonesia’s total production comes from South Sumatra, Bengkulu and Lampung.

Statistics Indonesia (BPS) has reported that out of the 1.2 million hectares of coffee plantations in the country, about 90 percent are owned by smallholder farmers. Robusta coffee plantations account for about 70 percent and the remaining 30 percent comprise Arabica coffee plantations.

In the past, most of Indonesia’s production was exported due to low demand at home. Over the past few years, pushed by the coffee craze among millennials, domestic demand has increased sharply and, according to the AEKI, is expected to reach between 360,000 tons and 380,000 tons, nearly half of the total production, this year.

However, the farmers have yet to benefit from the surge in consumption as the prices of their coffee beans are still low because they are considered low grade.

To improve the quality, the SCAI and other coffee organizations have arranged training such as agroforestry classes for coffee growers so that they will be equipped with better farming techniques and can apply more sustainable business practices.

“Most farmers were uninformed about good agricultural practices. For example, they used to be afraid that their trees would not bear coffee cherries after pruning them,” said SCOPI executive director Veronica Herlina on Aug. 13.

She said that good agricultural practices were more costly and more energy consuming because farmers needed to use proper tools, insecticides and fertilizers that were environmentally safe.

“Farmers are actually willing to learn, but we need to guide them while practicing,” said Veronica.

Sular, 52, from Dusun Sumber in Conto village, Bulukerto district, Wonogiri regency, Central Java, said that he and his fellow farmers had invited Yosef Bagus Adi Santoso and Haryanto from the Wonogirich and Wonogiri coffee communities, respectively, to educate local coffee farmers about how to improve their harvesting technique.

Under their guidance, the farmers applied proper processing techniques in harvesting, washing and drying the beans, separating them from their shells and selling them as green beans, he said.

Thanks to those efforts, coffee plantations in Wonogiri’s villages have been flourishing for the last two years.

“Now we know that we are supposed to harvest only the red [ripe] coffee cherries,” said Sular, who has been a coffee farmer for 29 years. “We used to sell coffee bean to a tengkulak [middlemen] for less than Rp 15,000 [US$1.05] per kilogram,” he said on July 28.

With the new techniques, the price of the coffee beans more than quadrupled to Rp 70,000 per kg, he added. “We will buy their coffee beans at a high price as long as they are willing to follow the proper mechanism,” said Haryanto. “In the first year, we bought their coffee beans at Rp 50,000 per kg. Now we pay Rp 70,000.”

He added that by buying coffee beans directly from farmers at a high price, he could cut short their marketing chain because they would not sell their products to cartels who bought them at a lower price.

Yosef said that coffee beans from farmers needed to be marketed with local or specialty branding because the planting area influenced the taste of the end product.

Coffee beans from those areas are sold with brands named after their villages of origin, such as Arabica Conto, Robusta Brenggolo and Robusta Semagar. Those varieties are in high demand at coffee shops in Wonogiri and neighboring cities of Surakarta and Yogyakarta.

SCAI chairman Syafrudin said Indonesia had a wide range of specialty coffee variants that attracted international attention.

According to Syafrudin, Indonesia Black Honey Arabica coffee from Ciwidey district in Bandung, West Java, for example, was sold at Rp 2 million per kg at coffee auctions during the Asia Pacific Coffee Conference in 2017.

Other renowned Indonesian specialty products include Luwak coffee, Aceh Gayo coffee and North Sumatra Mandheling coffee.

“We are seeing an increase in local consumption of Arabica coffee, especially with the emergence of new coffee shops in towns,” Syafrudin said. (eyc)

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