by Anna Canning, Peace Coffee Production Manager

Change. That's the buzzword in the background on the radio as I begin to describe my recent trip to Sumatra. They're summing up the current election season, but it also encapsulates the whirlwind that I observed on the ground. Since my last visit (in February 2006), many things have changed in the lives of the farmers of PPKGO, the coop from whom we have bought our Sumatran coffee for 5 years, as well as for the other residents of Aceh.

For many years, the province of Aceh has been wracked by a struggle of varying levels of intensity between separatists and the Indonesian military, with farmers who just wish to grow their crops and go about their lives caught in the middle. One bright spot to come out of the devastation of the December 2004 tsunami that hit the northern end of the island was a peace agreement between the two sides. When I was last in Sumatra, the agreement had recently been signed and many people expressed skepticism that it would hold as they'd seen treaties come and go throughout the conflict. More than two years later, the peace is still holding. Up in the mountains, that means that people can plant crops again, knowing with greater certainty that it will be safe to harvest them and that they will be able to take them to market. In this changed environment, the coffee scene has changed as well. 

For many years, the farmers of PPKGO were the only coffee farmers in Aceh (or Sumatra, or Indonesia for that matter) exporting Fair Trade organic coffee from the region. As we drove around in the mountains, we heard how much that has changed. There's an estimated 80-90,000 hectares (198,000-223,000 acres) of coffee-growing land in the prime mountainous area around the little village of Takengon and for many years, PPKGO was one of the only groups organizing there. That's changed dramatically; as of last month there were 18 organic organizations competing for that coffee, several of whom are also either certified Fair Trade or pending certification. Hoping to better understand the landscape, I set off for the region with Bill Harris, president of Cooperative Coffees, our importing cooperative, soon to be joined by Mané Alves, another member of the coop and a coffee expert.

We started our trip in Medan, the bustling port city where our coffee has its final stop before setting out to sea. Bill and I spent a day tasting and visiting in the warehouse where the coffee is sorted and loaded into burlap bags before retracing the coffee's trek backwards into the mountains. There are two ways from the mountains to the city, neither of them easy. There's the coast road—ten hours of low road past palm oil plantations, mangrove swamps and rice paddies and across swollen rivers. It's the rainy season, so some of these rivers have crested their banks, through houses and onto the road; we pass slowly through the milky brown water, children bodysurfing on the wake created by our tires. We take the mountain road down hill—twelve hours rounding hairpin curves, mostly in a grey rain, torrents of scooters passing us on both sides as we switch back and then back again.

We arrive late at our hotel—a vintage relic of happier tourist times on the shores of Lake Tawar. By coincidence, our trip coincides with PPKGO's annual Fair Trade inspection and most of the coop's leadership and ForesTrade's local staff are staying at the hotel with us. The inspection is a rigorous examination of the coop and its processes, members, and structure—farmers and coop leaders spend about a week with an inspector in days of meetings that often stretch to twelve hours. This inspector has flown in from Sri Lanka for the meetings and it's a vivid reminder of the challenges of communication— not only does he not speak the official Indonesian language, many of the farmers have two or more other languages as their primary languages.

As PPKGO is occupied with their inspection for several days, we spend our first day meeting with two recently-formed groups that we do not currently buy from, APKO and ASKOGO. Both of these groups were recently formed by farmers who, in many cases, were former members of PPKGO. The group's facilities are shared—a small warehouse is in construction and each group has a chilly office partitioned off facing a coffee receiving station housing two depulpers, machines for crushing the red cherry off the coffee bean.

Even though it's a holiday, members of both groups' leadership crowd into one of the tiny offices for a meeting. The general manager of ASKOGO is a genial man named Win Najmi who eagerly tells us the brief history of his organization, explaining that his is "a very small coop, all are sons, children of farmers. We want to keep farming and to improve the quality of our coffee. Our fathers never sold coffee abroad, but now we are exporting and hope to make them proud." He shows us the book of signed agreements between the association and each farmer, spelling out their respective responsibilities— "transparency," he says, that's why people want to be members of his coop, which is growing fast. In Win's eyes, the greatest obstacle currently facing his organization is that while they have received their organic certification, they are still awaiting their Fair Trade inspection, a certification that they see as vital to getting the best price for their coffee. In this, as in several other meetings here, the issue of price is central and we slowly plot our way through the many units to understand the numbers cited, converting from "bambu" of cherries priced in rupiah to wet pergamino in kilos and dollars. On the wall behind us as we meet, the production forecasts for the year are enumerated in kilos of cherry, broken down by village, number of hectares and growers per village. Until they get their final certification in place, both coops plan to sell most of that coffee on the local market. Frankly, for the individual farmer thinking about his own pocketbook, the choice is appealing. The local market in Aceh is lively. Now that the conflict is over, new players are swarming the coffee scene and a general consensus is that that competition is part of what's driving the generally high prices for Sumatran coffee up. Even for coffee that's neither Fair Trade nor organic certified, the local market price is high compared to other coffee producing countries.

If we had planned a trip to show a greater variety of organizations, it might not have been possible to create a shock greater than our visit with Koperasi Baitul Qiradh Baburrayyan (KBQB) the following morning. The organization processes and markets their coffee through a partnership with NCBA & USAID, the same partnership that created the Café Timor project, which I visited on my last visit to Indonesia, Joselito, the energetic manager of the facility, shows us around his palatial warehouse and acres of drying field. They got their Fair Trade certification just a few months ago and the coop's ranks are swelling fast. Lito shows us his system for receiving coffee and explains the secret to the organization's success in his opinion—they use their significant capital resources to offer cash on delivery, "there's no promise, no IOU, nothing. My members believe in us." The plant can process 1 container of coffee per day—that's about 18,000kg—and more is coming. 

Just down the road, Lito gestures proudly to one of his other accomplishments—thousands of coffee seedlings growing under shade cloth. He bends down and counts the leaves for us: four leaves means four months old, one more month and they'll be distributed to the 2,000 farmers they currently have waiting to buy them through the cooperative's micro-finance program. The goal is to distribute more than a million of these seedlings over three years to facilitate the rehabilitation of coffee-growing land abandoned during the conflict years. If KBQB and ASKOGO represent two very different new groups in the Aceh coffee scene, PPKGO are the experienced old hands who have seen many changes. Next month, I'll return to more stories of this island where the coffee trees bear flowers and fruit at the same time and tell their story along with an attempt to wrap up something like the state of coffee in Sumatra.

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