22 • Indonesia• C&CI May 2012
Indonesia’s coffee boom set to continue
is the world’s fourth most populous country has also exploded. Everywhere you ask, peo- ple say that Indonesia’s coffee boom is only just starting This year Indonesia is celebrating an
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almost unprecedented record, this being its 300th anniversary as a coffee exporter, the first bags of coffee produced in the former Dutch colony having been exported from Java to Amsterdam in 1712. It would take another 200 years before
Robusta was introduced to Indonesia, and just like Arabica, production quickly spread to the rest of Java and all the other major Indonesian islands. Covering more than 1.3 million hectares of
land, today coffee is grown across the Indonesian archipelago, with production con- centrated on Sumatra, which is home to 65- 70 per cent of total output. Some 15 per cent of Indonesian coffee is found on the island Java, with the rest spread out on Bali, Sulawesi, Flores, Timor and Borneo.
Sudden leap in output
However, years of stable production patterns have changed radically in the last five years, with production for the first time jumping to 9.15 million bags in the 2005-2006 cycle, according to the International Coffee Organization (ICO). Near perfect weather for that harvest and the modest recovery in prices after the coffee crisis at the time were said to be the main reasons for the record crop that year. Even so, yields didn’t surpass 7 bags per hectare, which is similar to most other producing countries. By 2008-2009 Indonesian farmers were
back with another record crop, this time 9.6 million bags, before reaching an all-time record of 11.38 million bags in the 2009-2010 harvest. "We had a good crop in the 2008-2009
cycle, and an even better crop the year after, and this sort of level is where we have seen Indonesia’s coffee production for some time now," a senior AIKE official told C&CI.
Indonesia’s coffee farmers are growing more coffee than in former years, despite the challenges posed by climate change
But the main reason why production fig-
ures have jumped so sharply and so sudden- ly is rapidly growing local consumption, said the AEKI official. "It’s not just that we have had two good crops, but the figure for local con- sumption had not been updated to reflect the fact that consumption has been growing here, to over 3 million bags by 2010." Traders and exporters say another factor
that has contributed to the growth is efforts by some of the country’s producers to replant older trees that were producing poor yields. This has had a particularly profound effect in the province of Aceh, on the northern-most tip of Sumatra, where, in the years that followed the tsunami on December 2004, producers in the conflict-torn Takengon region were able to return to their farms, which had been aban- doned during the armed struggle. By 2008, most of the farms in the Takengon region were back in production and this helped
spark the production boom. Surge explained
After growing an average of about 7 million bags for the past 20 years, some in the industry have questioned the surge in the production numbers from Indonesia. But AEKI argues that there is no reason to doubt this explanation. "If you look at average yields, even in the
2009-2010 crop, which was a record for us, we still didn’t get more than 8.5 bags per hectare, so it should really not be that diffi- cult to accept that the yields of 5-7 bags per hectare in an up-cycle year with good weather can produce between 20 and 30 percent more," said the AEKI official. The coincidence between the increase in
output in Indonesia and a decline in produc- tion in Colombia has returned the southeast
oday, as Indonesian coffee growers attempt to increase their average yields even further, local consumption in what
One of the oldest coffee producing nations in the world,
Indonesia started growing coffee over 300 years ago. For years production there was stable, between 6.5 and 7.5 million bags, so when production suddenly jumped to over 11 million bags two years ago, many in the industry asked how this had happened, as Maja Wallengren reports
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