PAPUA
Coffee: The New Frontier
Papua is known for its palm oil plantations, forestry products and extractive industry. Yet it is coffee that offers ordinary people in Indonesia’s easternmost province the chance to move away from a subsistence to a productive economy.
September 9, 2008
DEEP in Papua’s central highlands, 44-year-old Martinus Doo is looking forward to the next three months. That’s when his 1,100 coffee trees, spread out over 1 hectare of land, will be ready for harvesting. With an expected yield of 4 kilograms of beans per tree, that means the grizzled seasonal farmer will earn a whopping Rp44 million.
Martinus is one of an increasing number of Papuan farmers in Paniai who are turning to coffee as
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