The legendary story of Starbucks' selection of beans-East Timor bead coffee

The legendary story of Starbucks' successful selection of beans

East Timor's coffee production is very small, until 2001 it was an unknown variety of coffee, recently, Starbucks launched a new product, called East Timor bead coffee, from the introduction, this should be a single bean.

It is said that 3/4 of the land in East Timor is hills, coffee-rich mountain areas, high altitude, long sunshine, fully meet the conditions for planting coffee trees, coupled with the use of organic cultivation, so the excellent quality of East Timorese coffee, coffee lovers flock to, of which the Laclubar area is the world-famous Arabica coffee (Arabica coffee).

Ten years after East Timor's independence, the gap between the rich and the poor is still wide, and there is a widening trend. More than 40% of the people are below the poverty line announced by the United Nations, and food and clothing is still a problem. In the long run, Timor-Leste has good oil and gas reserves and is fully capable of transforming itself into an energy nation. But in the short term, poor infrastructure has affected his development. If the basic roads, docks and airports have not been repaired, how can we develop the energy industry?

Tourism is another hope for East Timor. However, tourism requires years of operation and investment from international consortia, which is not an easy task. No country's beaches are natural water and sand, and they are all the result of careful rectification and careful construction. It took decades for Bali to get to where it is today, and it is said that some of the fine sand used on the beach is imported from Australia. Supporting catering, hotels, all need a lot of investment. East Timor's society is still unstable and the development of tourism is also faced with many difficulties.

The last opportunity is to "grow coffee" as the people of East Timor are familiar with. This is no fantasy. Coffee has now become the main export product in East Timor, accounting for the largest proportion of the income of ordinary people, and the poorer East Timorese are, the more dependent they are on cash income from coffee cultivation.

Indonesia is the world's leading exporter of coffee, but most of them are robusta (including the famous Kopi Luwak), and only a few Mantenin, such as Sumatra, are Arabica. East Timorese beans are also Arabica beans, and because of the backward planting conditions, they can claim to produce almost completely organic Arabica beans. Now East Timor coffee has been accepted by many well-known brands, including Starbucks.

Let's talk about coffee now, generally starting with coffee beans, such as various roasting, grinding, brewing, milk foaming techniques and so on. But coffee doesn't grow to look like coffee beans. Studying the behavior of East Timorese farmers growing coffee reminds me that coffee beans are the kernels of berries. They have to be peeled and fleshed, then fermented and dried before we get the coffee beans we are used to. Much of the flavor of coffee beans is determined by fermentation and drying, while for farmers in East Timor, almost all are family workshops and there is no equipment for large-scale baking and grinding. A few people have the equipment to peel and remove meat, thus having the conditions to sell fermented or dried coffee beans. More than half of East Timorese farmers usually sell the most basic coffee berries.

Let's go back to some basic questions. The peeling and drying techniques of coffee are not complicated. Water washing and exposure are commonly used, that is, the pulp is peeled off by soaking, or the core is burnt out by exposure. Coffee beans produced in East Timor are generally washed with water. The price of washed and processed coffee beans is several times that of the original coffee berries. why are poor farmers unwilling to take this step and make more money?

According to Professor Brett Inder, it takes a different perspective to observe farmers who are struggling with life and death. Farmers who are extremely poor can not have any savings accumulation. What they think about every day is to feed the whole family. After harvesting a little coffee berries, you can immediately exchange money to make life a little easier for the whole family. Where can you resist this temptation and endure a few days to process and dry coffee. Although the expected income is much higher than selling berries directly, the temptation to sell berries directly to buy meat (or the pressure to repay debt) is more direct and stronger. By the end of the season, most of the coffee berries have been sold, and the food and clothing of the family has also improved. at this time, the proportion of peeled and dried coffee beans has increased significantly.

So even coffee farming is an industry that needs capital for the vast majority of impoverished East Timorese farmers. A little bit of the financial system could help East Timor improve the shape of coffee exports. But can coffee help East Timor out of the poverty trap? This is not optimistic. Over the past few decades, coffee prices around the world have been surprisingly stable, with few major fluctuations. Therefore, if East Timor relies on coffee to get out of the poverty trap, it still needs to find another way out and reconsider.