COFFEE NEWS

Indonesia has the second largest area of coffee plantations in the world but due to low yields it only ends up as the fifth largest producer after Brazil, Colombia, Vietnam, and India, a researcher said.

Surip Mawardi, a researcher from the Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute (ICCRI), said last week that Indonesia’s coffee plantation area totaled 1.3 million hectares but its production was still less than 700 kilograms per hectare per year.

“It’s very low compared to Vietnam’s annual production of 1,540 kilograms per hectare, Colombia’s 1,220 kilograms, and Brazil’s 1,000 kilograms.

“That’s why Vietnam is up from fifth largest producer to second largest, while Indonesia is down to fifth from third largest producer in the world,” he said.

Surip was speaking to the press after addressing a seminar on Indonesian coffee development, which was organized by PT. Nestle Indonesia, the subsidiary of Nestle S.A. the world’s leading producer of food and beverages.

Latest Agriculture Ministry data shows that Brazil, with a total area under coffee plantations of 2.37 million hectares has a total production of 2.02 million tons per year, Colombia with 560,000 hectares produces 744,000 tons per year, Vietnam with 491,800 hectares produces 1.05 million tons per year, while India with 328,000 hectares has an annual production of 507,000 tons.

“It’s because these countries adopted best farming practices with advanced agricultural technology. But we in Indonesia are yet to apply such technology to all of our coffee farmers.

“Most of our farmers are not yet aware of the importance of having good seedlings for their plantations,” he noted.

To address the problem, Achmad Manggabarani, the ministry’s director general of plantations, said in the same seminar that the government was pursuing efforts to promote the use of so-called Somatic Embryogenesis (SE) techniques among Indonesian coffee farmers and urged them to use plantlets and seedlings developed this way.

He said that the application of the SE technique had been pursued in cooperation with ICCRI, a state-owned agricultural research institute under the ministry of agriculture, and Nestle Indonesia — the largest buyers of coffee beans in Indonesia, with total annual purchases of about 70,000 tons of coffee per year, mostly from plantations in Sumatra.

Nestle claims to be the first corporation in the world using SE techniques in coffee plantations.
The Nestle research and development center in Tours in France, has conducted a mapping of Indonesia’s coffee trees and had identified 33 elite types, of which six of the best are being evaluated.

The chosen elite plantlets, which will be used to produce coffee seedlings, will be multiplied using SE technique that can produce up to 22 million plantlets per year.

The SE project is expected improve the coffee farmers’ competitive advantage in the international market by helping them to grow the best strains of coffee plantlets.

“This year we’ve targeted that our farmers in Sumatra and Java will grow about one million of such seedlings.

“Until now we’ve managed to secure the planting of 500,000 seedlings. Next year we target the planting of four million seedlings, and then in 2011 six million seedlings,” Achmad said.

With every hectare being able to accommodate 1,300 seedlings, the area that had been planted with the new seedlings has now reached about 385 hectares.

He said that the government was serious in developing coffee plantations as coffee was one of the top commodities in the country.

Employing 2.3 million people across the archipelago, the coffee plantation sector contribution to foreign exchange has been increasing during the last four years from US$504.4 million in 2005, to $588.50 million in 2006, to $636.42 millions or 11.66 percent of total agricultural exports in 2007, to $991.46 million or 24 percent of total agricultural exports in 2008.

“The SE technique has been also successfully applied to our cocoa plantations. Such techniques can increase the coffee yield by more than 100 percent from the current yield of less than 700 kilograms per hectare per year.

“By applying this, we hope we can double our coffee production and income in the next five years,” he said.

This year we’ve targeted that our farmers in Sumatra and Java will grow about one million of such seedlings.

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/07/06/ri-moves-raise-coffee-output.html

The future for Brazil’s mighty farm sector could be grim, with hotter temperatures pushing crops past its borders, uphill into the Andes and toward the tip of South America.

So Brazilian scientists and agronomists are rushing to deter the effects of climate change on the world’s biggest coffee producer and second-ranking soybean grower, a country crucial to the international food supply.

Experts in tropical agriculture are developing genetically modified coffee, soy beans and other crops that can withstand higher temperatures in Brazil’s expanding northeastern desert, new pests and diseases and more flooding in low-lying areas.

This year, the scientists are preparing the first large-scale plantings to test the productivity of new genetically modified soy crops at a climate-controlled research station in the southern state of Parana.

“Under the current situation, the production of food is threatened,” said Eduardo Assad, a researcher for Brazil’s agricultural research agency Embrapa.

Already, the world economic crisis has thrown Brazilian agricultural commodities into a slump, with grain prices plunging on weak demand. But climate change remains an acute long-term concern: The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts an increase in global temperatures of 3.6 to 7.2 degrees in the next 20 years, with even greater temperature increases in the Amazon.

That could mean a 10% reduction Brazil’s arable land for coffee by 2020 — and a one-third reduction by 2070 — as the crop’s suitable climate migrates into the Andean foothills of neighboring Argentina, according to a study Assad directed.

Brazil’s coffee plantations extend across 5.7 million acres and produce more than twice as much as the next-largest grower, Vietnam.

Brazil’s soy crop, the largest outside the USA, would lose an estimated 20% of its cultivatable land by 2020. Beans, corn, sunflower, cotton are among other crops that would suffer a similar retreat due to high temperatures, the Embrapa study found.

“What we are doing in Brazil is adapting, anticipating what is to come,” Assad said. “We’ve been working on this for two years, and we are going to need five or 10 years to be prepared.”

Scientists at Embrapa have been isolating genes from drought-resistant plants and combining them with traditional crops. It’s a difficult process, but researchers have seen some early successes in soy plants that respond favorably to dry, hot conditions while thriving in normal weather as well.

Modified bean and coffee varieties have not yet shown as much success.

Scientists around the world are turning to genetic engineering to bolster food production as supplies are stretched by population growth, drought and climate change. These genetically modified seeds have been controversial — some farmers and environmentalists criticize the role of agricultural corporations, and worry about health consequences. But Brazil’s biosafety commission has already approved modified varieties of corn, soybeans and cotton, and local scientists say their new seeds will be tested for safety.

The climate change panel’s computer models show that even slight warming will reduce crop yields across the tropics. Brazil may be better equipped than most to adapt, since its scientists have spent decades developing fertilizer and soil management, infrastructure and public policies that have transformed arid tropical plains into today’s thriving agricultural zones.

“We should see the real changes in 10 or 20 years” from global warming, said genetic engineering specialist Francisco Aragao. “If we want to do agricultural investigations to combat the effects, you have to start now.”

Enlarge
A young worker uses a hoe to clear the furrows between the coffee trees in the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. Climate change could cause a 10% reduction Brazil’s arable land for coffee by 2020 and a one-third reduction by 2070.

Source: http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2009-02-19-brazil-coffee-climate-change_N.htm

Workers from different sectors responded to a call by the Cuban Central Workers Confederation to volunteer in the harvest of coffee beans in the areas hit by Ike’s winds.

According to the Juventud Rebelde daily, the goal is to collect more than 60,000 bushels of coffee in the eastern Cuban province of Guantanamo, which is the largest producer of the bean for exports in the country.

Preliminary assessments report that Guantanamo lost over 170,000 bushels of coffee, and the roofs of coffee farms were damaged.

Emilio Rivera, with the Province’s Coffee Production Office, assured that much of the fallen beans could be recovered if they are picked and processed before they rot.

The enterprise thus works to clean access roads to the coffee plantations in order to take out the collected beans as quickly as possible.

The hurricane winds brought down dozens of trees that had been planted to provide shade to the coffee trees. The absence of trees will hinder the growth of the coffee plants, warned the expert.

Some 284,000 plants of Coffea Arabica were trapped or destroyed by the fallen branches in the Guantanamo’s municipality of Maisi, the largest coffee producer in the island. Workers of the coffee sector in the area are striving to plant back the coffee trees, while the sowing has been intensified.

The volunteers, including students are working in the collection of the beans on the ground and the harvest of the ones that resisted the strong winds and the rain. Nearly 30,000 of over 230,000 bushels of coffee have been collected from the trees by farmers and volunteers in Maisi.

Source: http://www.cubanews.ain.cu/2008/0929cafetalescuba.htm

Abundant harvests and soaring demand from non-traditional coffee importers propelled Indonesia’s coffee bean exports during the first half of the year, allowing the country to cash in on the high global price of the commodity.

More than 350 exporters grouped under the Association of Indonesian Coffee Exporters (AEKI) revealed recently coffee exports rose 12.5 percent to 180,000 tons between January and June this year compared to in the same period last year.

Executive Secretary of the AEKI, Rachim Kartabrata, told The Jakarta Post high rainfall this year had provided farmers with larger harvest yield.

“If such conditions continue, we are optimistic some 540,000 tons of coffee beans can be harvested this year, or up 6 percent from last year’s 510,000 tons,” he said.

The association expects total coffee exports to reach 170,000 tons in the second semester, and 350,000 tons for the year, up from 290,000 tons last year and 307,880 tons in 2006.

Robusta accounts for up to 80 percent of Indonesia’s total production, while Arabica accounts for the remainder. Indonesia’s main export destinations are the United States, western Europe and Japan.

Rachim said the jump in exports was also attributable to a surge in demand from emerging markets, including Russia, China, Taiwan, South Korea and Malaysia.

With higher-than-expected harvests, farmers and exporters are already capitalizing on the relatively high global coffee prices. Robusta is currently priced at US$2.2 per kilogram and Arabica at $3.08 per kg.

“From the current market price, farmers can still get higher profits because they only spend around Rp 3,500 (38 US cents) per kilogram on production costs,” he said.

According to the association, coffee hit its lowest point on the global market in 2002, with the beans selling for as low as Rp 2,500 per kg, forcing 170 exports in Lampung, the country’s biggest coffee-growing province, to go out of business.

Subsequently, many farmers turned to corn and cassava, which are simpler to cultivate and generally reap higher profits. However, current coffee production is still able to match domestic and global demand.

“Farmers will need only six months to harvest cassava crops, while they need up to three years to plant and harvest qualified coffee beans,” Rachim said, adding that most coffee plantations in Indonesia were currently at their productive peak.

The AEKI estimates farmers in several Robusta coffee centers, including Lampung and South Sumatra, will enjoy high revenue during harvest season, which spans June and July.

Arabica farmers in North Sumatra and Nangore Aceh Darussalam will harvest again in October, having just come off the back of an enormous harvest in May.

However, Rahma, owner of coffee grower and processor CV Gudang Ketiara, in Takengon, Aceh, said global demand for coffee could slump due to the world-wide economic slow down.

“I heard that some buyers in Europe and the United States have capped their orders due to slow sales there. I hope the government can help us find new buyers from other non-traditional importers,” she said.

CV Gudang Ketiara employs more than 150 workers and ships at least 18 tons of Gayo Arabica beans to Europe every month.

Indonesia is the fifth biggest coffee producer in the world, after Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia and Mexico.

Indonesian coffee is mainly traded in London and New York.

As reported by Bloomberg on Friday, coffee rose for a second day on the London commodity exchange due to speculation roasters had recently secured supplies when prices hit a two-week low.

Robusta coffee for September delivery climbed $17, or 0.7 percent, to $2,331 per metric ton on the Liffe exchange. Prices dropped 5.9 percent this week, the first decline in four weeks. Robusta beans are used to make instant coffee and espresso.

Coffee has climbed 22 percent in the past year, trailing a 45 percent rise of the UBS Bloomberg CMCI Index of 26 commodities, Bloomberg reported. (ewd)

Domestic coffee consumption
2006: 150,000 tons
2007: 160,000 tons
2008: 170,000 tons

Domestic coffee plantation area (hectares)
2007: 1,279,220
2008: 1,295,237

Imported coffee
2006: 10,000 tons
2007: 20,000 tons

Source: http://old.thejakartapost.com/detailbusiness.asp?fileid=20080714.L01&irec=0

Ed. Despite high fuel prices, due to increased production output from Brazil, Honduras, Indonesia, Kenya, Costa Rica etc., I see coffee prices declining over the next year.

~ Plant the coffee seed in the nursery and tend carefully for six months

~ Transplant the seedling into rows

~ Cultivate and prune the seedling for the next three to five years until the first crop develops

~ After flowering and fruit formation, hand pick only the ripe cherries

~ Transport the ripe coffee cherries to the mill for removal of the pulp layer

~ Soak the beans in water to begin the fermentation process

~ Thoroughly wash the parchment-covered beans

~ Dry the beans in their parchment layer

~ Hull the beans to remove the parchment layer

~ Polish the beans

~ Grade according to factors such as size, defects, density and altitude of growth

~ Transport the bagged, graded beans to the seaport for shipment

~ Market to brokers and wholesale roasters

~ Ship the beans via boat to arrive at the broker or roaster weeks to months later

~ After arrival, separate and warehouse the bags of beans

~ Weigh and roast the green beans

~ Cool the roasted beans and put through a de-stoning process to remove foreign materials such as rocks and sticks

~ Weigh and blend or (optional) flavor the beans

~ Package for resale

~ Ship to retail stores and sell to consumers

~ Grind the roasted beans

~ Make a great cup of specialty coffee and enjoy!

Source: http://www.oregoncoffee.com/coffeeschool.htm

A Chinese coffee bean supplier to Nestle (NESN.VX: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Tuesday it aims to become the country’s first listed coffee producer by 2011.

Dehong Hougu Coffee Ltd, which called itself China’s biggest coffee grower, seeks to raise 3 billion yuan ($437 million) selling shares publicly for expansion.

“China has a huge potential for coffee business,” Vice President Deng Gang said by telephone. The company is restructuring itself and has hired accountants and lawyers for the planned listing, he said.

China’s nascent, but fast-expanding coffee market is dominated by foreign companies, including Nestle, Starbucks Corp (SBUX.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and Coffee Bean and Tea Leaves. Coffee consumption in China, though small, is growing 20 percent a year, Starbucks has said.

Hougu, which is based in southwestern Yunnan province and mainly grows coffee for exports, needs funding to expand its own processing and retail businesses.

It is already selling its own Hougu-branded coffee in Yunnan through retail outlets as well as its own coffee shops, and has plans to expand sales outside its home base. Hougu means “back valley” in English.

“We’re transforming from a coffee grower to a branded coffee maker and seller,” Deng said. “Nestle is still our client and we’re still too small to compete with it.”

Source: http://uk.reuters.com/article/rbssConsumerGoodsAndRetailNews/idUKPEK30059320080701

Cat-poo coffee is SO over. The latest coffee involving animals is monkey-chewed coffee.

And the biggest difference between the two is that monkey-enhanced coffee is really, really good. The head judge of the world barista championships gave it a score of 98 out of 100.

The earlier novelty, kopi luwak coffee, or “cat-poo” coffee, passed undigested through a civet cat and it’s been said that stomach enzymes break down proteins, taking the edge off the bitter taste. Judges gave that coffee 74 out of 100.

“Monkey coffee,” which detours through the mouth of the rhesus macaqueor monkey, is more correctly called the India Devon Estate 795 Arabica, and it’s offered for the first time in Canada at 49th Parallel coffee bar (2152 West Fourth Ave.). It sells for $25 for a 12-ounce bag or $1.75 for a cup of drip coffee or $2.36 for an espresso.

Tiffany Soper, 49th Parallel’s publicist, says the monkeys eat the coffee cherries as part of their diet, spitting out the inner bean. The beans are then harvested from the ground.

“Those beans would normally be mixed in with the rest of the harvest but this year, they decided to separate them from the rest and roast them on their own to see what it would be like. It turned out to be fantastic,” she says. “The flavours are amazing.”

She says it’s because the monkeys source out the ripest fruit and they tend to stay in shade-protected areas of the plantation. Shade produces better quality coffee beans and monkeys, Soper says, can select ripened beans better than humans. “The customers are loving it,” she says. Customers can be assured they won’t be brewing monkey saliva. The beans are sun-dried, then washed, then processed, then washed again before they’re roasted at 500 F.

The only wrinkle in this new product at 49th Parallel is people have cat-poo coffee on their brains. “People are confused. They think monkeys are pooing it out. We have to make it very clear. They’re not pooing it out.” She suggests that cat-poo coffee was more novelty than a drink for serious coffee aficionados. “The reason Vince [Piccolo, owner of 49th Parallel] wanted to bring it in was all about flvour and quality. It’s a really, really beautiful coffee.”

I’m thinking, why stop at monkeys and coffee? Would it be possible to put the racoons and squirrels in my neighbourhood to work as crop selectors of some sort?

Source:
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/arts/story.html?id=3745acca-03ea-4bb5-a95b-471d392c94d3

How much would you pay for a cup of liquid cat dung?   Quite a lot, if some highly discerning coffee drinkers are anything to go by.

You won’t find kopi luwak at your local coffee shop

On the lush, volcanic slopes of the Indonesian archipelago, villagers “harvest” kopi luwak.

The beans used for the world’s rarest and most expensive coffee have already been munched by cat-like palm civets, and now they are plucked from the dung to be dried and roasted.

Retailing in North America and Europe for up to $600 a kg, kopi luwak, literally “civet coffee” in Indonesian, is not a brew for the faint hearted.

Less than 230kg of it is estimated to be produced a year on the islands of Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi, and war and disease are making it even harder to find.

 

   

“I first read about it in 1980 but didn’t manage to get my

 

hands on any until 1993,” says Michael Beech of Raven’s Brew

 

Coffee Inc.

Until last year, when supplies began to dry up, it

 

was the main supplier of kopi luwak in the United States.

 

   

The kopi luwak bean comes from only three Indonesian islands

His clients have ranged from ordinary java junkies to comedy actor John Cleese of Monty Python fame, he says.

The firm has a backlog of 300 kopi luwak orders to fill at $75 for 114 grams. 

“To be honest, you can’t get $75 worth of quality in any coffee. You are really paying for the experience,” says Beech.

 

  

Fussy eater

The brew has become so rare that a newly published book on

 

coffee in Indonesia, “A cup of Java,” relegates it to legend.

 

“We have failed to find any coffee-seller who admits to

 

actually selling kopi luwak from the faeces of the civet cat,”

 

write authors Gabriella Teggia and Mark Hanusz.

 

To many Indonesians, the term kopi luwak has come to mean

 

simply the beans which the civet - a notoriously fussy eater

 

which selects only the ripest coffee cherries - would choose.

 

The war in Aceh province made kopi luwak even more rare

“We just use the name for branding, but we don’t trade in it,” says Jeffrey Susanto, whose family runs the Kopi Luwak string of gourmet coffee shops in Jakarta.

 

The rarity of kopi luwak is confirmed by Nugroho Bintang Satrio, the Central Java chief of the Indonesian Coffee

 

Exporters Association.

 

  

“Only a tiny portion of small-holders are left who collect it,” he said, adding that traders buy it at about 11,000 rupiah ($1.30) a kilo, about twice the price of ordinary robusta.

 

   

Deadly harvest

In the last year, a government offensive against rebels in

 

rugged Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra has also

 

cut into supply. “Farmers get killed if they harvest the coffee

 

too far into the bush,” said one trader.

 

Then there is the bad press caused by the deadly flu-like

 

SARS virus.

Civets, which are not cats but are related to mongooses, have been slaughtered in their thousands in China and imports banned from many Western countries for fear they carry SARS.

 

“Even if SARS was associated with the coffee itself, by the

 

time it’s collected and washed there is a very long period that

 

has elapsed,” says Massimo Marcone, a food scientist at the

 

University of Guelph in Canada, who has carried out extensive

 

tests on kopi luwak and deemed it safe.

 

Producers are working on an elephant poop variety

Yet, despite all that, some still harbour doubts.

 

   

“Sumatra, in the popular imagination anyway, is just too close to China and I’m just wary of the whole SARS thing,” says Beech, adding that Raven’s Brew may cease to offer kopi luwak.

 

   

“We are working on an elephant poop coffee,” he says with a chuckle, explaining a plan he vows is serious.

The idea is to feed coffee to tuskers at an elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka and sell the product, farming the proceeds back into the orphanage.

 

   

“It will be a do-gooder coffee, pooped out by bonafide orphan elephants,” Beech explains.

 

According to some experts, a bean that has been partly digested tastes special.

 

   

“What I did find with kopi luwak was that the acids, the gastric juices and the enzymes were actually getting inside the bean and breaking down the proteins,” says Marcone.

 

   

“You start getting amino acids. When these things are heated during roasting, they react with other components and they create certain flavour compounds different from other beans.”

 

   

Exotic processing

So what does the world’s most pricey coffee taste like?

 

Pure unadulterated coffee beans, undigested by any animal

Coffee buffs say it depends on whether the civet has been

 

eating arabica or robusta beans.

 

   

“Initially people thought it must be the best coffee in the world, but I have to be honest about it, it’s a crappy cup of

 

coffee,” says Beech of the robusta variety.

 

   

No matter how exotic the processing, it is mostly robusta cherries the luwak munches.

That fact is a legacy of the coffee blight which in 1878 destroyed every low-lying arabica plant from Ceylon to Timor, allowing Brazil and Colombia to take the lead as the world’s main suppliers of arabica.

 

   

Weeks of phone calls around Indonesia results in a fragrant mailbox containing a brown envelope from an East Java coffee

 

trader. Inside is 250 grams of brown gold - kopi luwak arabica.

 

   

The aroma is rich and strong and the beans oily. Ground and

 

steeped in boiling water the flavour is, well, much like any

 

other coffee.

But the experience lingers in the memory.

Source:

http://english.aljazeera.net/English/Archive/Archive?ArchiveID=2966

 

This Crazy Computer controlled coffee roaster has been developed by Matthew Williams. The machine is also as strange as its name.

The basic PID of the device is a Fuji PXR4 that can be used with a laptop or a computer via a USB port.

In the roaster a fan is used to control the roast process and the roast chamber is made using bakelite tube and a 3” diameter Glass tube.

For the heat to dissipate without damaging the whole setup Matthew has used a high temperature RTV Silicone.

There is a screen at the bottom of the device that can be used to empty the roaster and get freshly roasted beans for a great cup of coffee on a cool and breezy winter morning.

Source:

http://www.gizmowatch.com/entry/computer-controlled-coffee-roaster/

Australia, April 18 Huge Australian termites are posing a threat to cocoa, coffee and timber plantations in Papua New Guinea.

 

The mastotermes were accidentally taken to Papua New Guinea during World War II and were thought to have been eradicated in the 1970s.

 

But now the termites have been discovered in the township of Lae where they destroyed a section of a local hospital.

 

A spokesman for the North Territory Department of Primary Industry says the damage could be “catastrophic” if the termites spread from the wet area of Lae to the drier crop lands. The spokesman, Brian Wilson, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that authorities “obviously need to eradicate the termites.”

Source:

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/53620.html