Papua New Guinea

Why this origin matters

The USDA puts Papua New Guinea's crop at 800,000 bags on the governed estimate for 2025/26, and what sets the country apart is who grows it. The Coffee Industry Corporation says village-based small farmers produce 85 per cent of the crop and that some 400,000 rural households depend on it for all or part of their income. The estates declined and the villages took over, and most of the coffee leaves the farm as parchment a household pulped, fermented and dried itself. The country's own figures show production declining through the decade to 2016, when it averaged 995,000 bags a year, and since 2017 it has had the coffee berry borer. The USDA's estimate and the corporation's figures are two bodies' counts and are not one series.

Where coffee grows

Arabica is a highland crop here. An academic handbook of 2009 says it is usually grown between 700 and 2,050 metres, occasionally as low as 100 and as high as 2,400, in the central highlands and some mountainous parts of Morobe and Madang provinces, and that robusta is usually grown between sea level and 550 metres. On the Coffee Industry Corporation's figures for 2006, as the handbook charts them, Western Highlands and Eastern Highlands each grew 41 per cent of the national crop, Morobe and Simbu 6 per cent each, Enga 4 and Southern Highlands 2. The corporation's own statistics page, which describes the decade to 2016, says coffee is grown in 16 provinces and that Eastern Highlands, Western Highlands, Jiwaka, Morobe and Simbu account for over 90 per cent; it adds that East Sepik supplies most of the robusta exported. A 2024 research report gives Eastern Highlands 58 per cent of national production, on the corporation's data and without a year; the corporation's own page on the province, also undated, calls it the second-largest producer after Western Highlands. The three statements cannot all describe the same year, and CoffeeHQ found no dated provincial table later than 2006 to settle it. The corporation also describes lowland farmers in East New Britain, New Ireland, Morobe and the Sepik taking up coffee beside cocoa, coconut and vanilla. None of these is a boundary: they are provinces, and CoffeeHQ read no document that defines a coffee region smaller than one.

The handbook says both species are grown where average rainfall is between 1,700 and 5,000 millimetres a year. The training manual used by extension officers says rain after a dry spell brings on flowering, some of it from September and most at the start of the wet season, which it puts at October to November around Mount Hagen and Goroka, and that fruit takes eight to eleven months from flower to ripe cherry. The villages a research team studied in Eastern Highlands Province lay at about 1,600 metres in the Asaro and Bena valleys and between 1,400 and 2,000 metres at two remote sites. Those are the altitudes of four study sites, not a description of the country.

Coffee that leaves on someone's back

A research team that worked at four sites in Eastern Highlands Province called poor market access the most significant constraint wherever there was no road. At Baira the airstrip was closed for several years for want of maintenance, and coffee went out on people's backs to the nearest road, six to eight hours' walk for a fit villager; about 70 per cent of households carried their own. At Marawaka, where flying coffee out cost 3.20 kina a kilogram, more than 90 per cent of households carried their parchment to market, a full day's walk.

The same report found parchment doing the work of money at Baira. A 60-kilogram bag was worth 100 kina in local exchange at the time of fieldwork, store goods were bought with it, a live chicken cost ten kilograms, and bags were used for bride price, compensation payments and gambling debts. These are observations of two remote communities between 2010 and 2015, and the report sets them beside two valleys with good roads where vegetables and fruit competed with coffee for a household's time.

Species and varieties

Historically arabica has been about 95 per cent of production and robusta 5 per cent, on the handbook's account, with robusta falling below 1 per cent by the mid-2000s; it reports that output in East Sepik, the main robusta province, fell after 2002 as cocoa and vanilla were planted. The governed USDA estimate gives one national total and no split. A 2017 research report, crediting an officer of the Coffee Industry Corporation, lists six arabica varieties in commercial use: Typica, Bourbon, Arusha and Mundo Novo, which are tall, and Caturra and Catimor, which are dwarf. It says all but Catimor lack resistance to leaf rust, which it calls a problem in parts of the highlands. No document read gives the share of the area under any of them.

Why the tall, old varieties stayed

Dwarf varieties planted densely yield more to the hectare, and the 2017 report found that smallholders did not want them. Its explanation is the farming system: households spread their labour across food gardens, markets and social obligations, put little into any one crop, and rarely buy fertiliser. Under that regime, it says, densely planted Caturra and Catimor run short of nutrients and die back, their tightly clustered cherries are slower to pick ripe, pickers must stoop, and the crowded rows are cold and damp to work in early in the morning.

So the hardier tall types are preferred, Typica above all, and Mundo Novo where rust is absent. At the two accessible sites the team found roughly similar proportions of Typica, Arusha and Bourbon. At the remote ones a single variety dominated, two thirds of trees being Typica at Baira and three quarters Arusha at Marawaka, and replacements were more likely to be seedlings that had come up under old trees. The later report makes the general point a principle: work with low-input farming instead of trying to turn it into high-input farming, a strategy it says has not worked well.

Harvest

The documents agree on a single main arabica season in the middle of the year and differ on its edges. The training manual says the main harvest normally runs from May to July, with usually enough cherry ripening from March to October for more picking. The handbook says the main season is generally May to September and particularly June, July and August, varying a little between years and places; a box in it adds that village coffee sales are lowest in January, February and March. Altitude moves it within a single community: at Baira, a remote site in Eastern Highlands Province, researchers recorded gardens in grassland at 1,400 to 1,600 metres harvested in April and May and gardens in forest at 1,800 to 2,000 metres harvested from July to October. For robusta the handbook reports a main harvest from May to August around Milne Bay and no definite season on the Gazelle Peninsula, nearer the equator.

The borer the handbook warned about arrived in 2017

In 2009 the handbook noted that the coffee berry borer was present across the border in Indonesian Papua, that only urgent quarantine would keep it out, and that if it reached the highlands it was likely to have a severe effect. The 2024 research report records what happened: the pest was first detected in the Banz area in 2017 and spread rapidly through the main highland growing areas and into parts of the lowlands. The Coffee Industry Corporation's vehicles and staff were put onto an eradication programme, and the movement of cherry was banned. The report's view is that eradication has proved impossible elsewhere and that growers will have to live with it. The control it reports as most effective is full and regular picking, with the trees stripped at the end of the season.

How much it has cost nationally is not something CoffeeHQ can state. In focus groups held in Simbu and Eastern Highlands in early 2024, more than three quarters of the communities sampled said they had lost over half of their last harvest to it; the article reporting them says the work is not peer reviewed, and it describes those communities only. A 2023 research note models a 10 per cent and a 50 per cent loss, which are scenarios and not measurements.

How the coffee is processed

The coffee is washed, and most of it is washed by the household that grew it. The training manual describes the method it teaches: float and sort the cherry, pulp it, ferment the beans for a day to a day and a half in strong bags with small holes, rinsing at least once a day, wash, and dry in the sun on beds or sheets, turning three or four times a day. It says hand-pulped, bag-fermented parchment can take up to ten days to dry. The household then sells parchment; hulling it to green bean is done at a processor's dry factory. In 2007, on the handbook's count from the Coffee Industry Corporation, there were 58 dry factories and 45 wet ones, 17 exporters, and an estimated 5,000 itinerant buyers. A research note gives the rule of thumb that five kilograms of cherry make one of parchment and 1.25 kilograms of parchment make one of green bean.

What a bag fermentation costs, and one group that stopped using it

Most smallholders are paid the Y1 price, the research reports say, and they locate the reason in processing, particularly fermentation and washing. In March 2008 parchment of X grade fetched 9.18 kina a kilogram against 6.87 for Y1, a third more, and A and AA 41 per cent more. Where a household has no hand pulper it is worse: at Marawaka only 14 per cent owned one, and a bag of cherry that takes half an hour to pulp by machine takes six hours with a stone, so a day's picking was pulped over two or three days.

From 2020 a farmer group at Bena ran a small machine that strips the mucilage mechanically, removing the fermentation step, and sold through one exporter. In its first season 91 per cent of 1,714 kilograms of green bean graded Plantation AX, and for three seasons the group was paid between 39 and 77 per cent above the price of first-class parchment. The borer reached the site in 2021, and the report says its spread there led to a further drop in quality: in 2023 the group sold 1,323 kilograms and 89 per cent of it graded Y1, in a season when the world price was also low. That is one group at one site, and the report presents it as a trial.

How it is graded and sold

Two sets of grade names appear in the documents, and none of them explains how one maps to the other. The Coffee Industry Corporation's pages list export grades in descending order as AA, A, X, PSC and Y, call the first three estate grades and the last two smallholder grades, and say Y1 made up 58 per cent of exports, PSC (Premium Smallholder Coffee) 12 per cent, X 9 and A 6. The 2025 training manual grades green bean A, B, Y, Y2 and Y3 by cup quality and defects, from at most 10 defects a kilogram for A to 150 for Y2, and classes parchment 1, 2 or 3 under a national standard of 2015. Its prices for August 2023 show what the difference is worth: 13.80 kina a kilogram for A-grade green bean delivered at Lae against 7.55 for Y and 4.00 for Y2. Nearly everything is exported as green beans. Germany, the United States and Australia are the main buyers in both the 2006 figures and the corporation's later ones, and in 2006/07 six exporters handled 85 per cent of the trade. Certified coffee, a 2024 report says on the word of a corporation officer, was 18 per cent of exports in 2023; it sets that against 5 per cent in 2008, from an earlier study CoffeeHQ has not opened.

How coffee is drunk in Papua New Guinea

Almost none of the crop is drunk at home. A 2009 academic handbook put domestic consumption at under 100 tonnes a year, about 0.1 per cent of production, and noted that roast and ground coffee had been made commercially in the country only since 1982. The Coffee Industry Corporation's statistics page says 99.9 per cent of what is produced is exported as green beans. A 2023 research note, working from a household survey of 2009/10, likewise says very little is consumed by households, and that most of what is drunk is drunk by better-off rural households in the highlands. CoffeeHQ read nothing on cafés or on how coffee is prepared at home.

The handbook's figure is for the mid-2000s. The research note's per-head figures from the survey do not reconcile with the handbook's total or with the note's own model, and are not repeated here.

History

The sources do not agree on how coffee arrived. The academic handbook dates its introduction to 1873 and has it growing in the Rabaul botanical garden by 1890. The Coffee Industry Corporation's present history suggests German New Guinea in the late 1800s and Catholic missionaries in Papua in 1885, with the first official mention in 1890; its earlier page credited the British administration of Papua. They agree on what followed: experimental and botanical plantings, a few plantations before the Second World War, among them one at Wau in Morobe begun in 1928, and no significant crop until the early 1950s. Then small expatriate-owned plantations and villages in the central highlands began growing arabica commercially; the corporation dates smallholder planting to 1952 in the Asaro Valley. Smallholder output, a research note says from the corporation's data, rose from about 3,000 tonnes in 1962/63 to 21,000 in 1969/70. Leaf rust broke out in 1986. In 1991 three bodies were merged into the Coffee Industry Corporation. Production peaked at 84,000 tonnes in 1989 and again in 1998, on the handbook's figures, and a 2023 research note, reading FAO data, says it has trended down since 2000.

An administration that tried to slow the planting, and officers who ignored it

The handbook records two moments when the Australian administration acted to hold coffee back. In 1954 it took steps to reduce the rate at which land was being alienated for commercial coffee plantations, and by 1961 new plantation development had effectively ceased. Then, to meet the quotas of the 1962 International Coffee Agreement, it prohibited further estate development, banned coffee on new agricultural leases and settlement schemes, and cut extension and promotion among smallholders.

It did not work on the villages. Smallholder production went on rising by an average of 28 per cent a year between 1961 and 1968, most of it in Eastern Highlands, Western Highlands and Simbu, where, the handbook says, many Australian agricultural extension officers chose to quietly ignore the bans on helping villagers plant. The reasons it gives for the expansion are extension, the lack of any other way to earn cash, high prices, the Highlands Highway built in the mid-1960s, and the example of the plantations themselves.

The quota requirements were abandoned in December 1972 and the government, by then approaching independence in 1975, tried to revive extension in less developed areas such as Southern Highlands. The handbook is careful about the result: production rose sharply in the 1970s, and it thinks high prices mattered more than the renewed effort.

From 107 plantations to 33

There were 107 coffee plantations operating in 1977 and 33 in 2007, on the Coffee Industry Corporation's counts as the handbook reports them. Between 1985 and 2005 smallholder production doubled and its share of the crop rose from 65 to 85 per cent, while output from plantations and blocks halved. All of the growth of those decades, the handbook concludes, came from villages.

Blocks are the middle tier. In the early 1980s the government sponsored smallholder coffee blocks: parcels removed from customary tenure, owned by families or groups of families apart from village plantings, and often managed by a professional organisation. The corporation defines a block as 5 to 29 hectares of coffee and a plantation as 30 or more, and counted 636 blocks in 2007; the handbook calls their management highly variable, with many producing poorly. The corporation's own page puts blocks at 11 per cent of the crop and plantations at 4.

The decline cost the villages something as well. A 2017 research report argues that plantations had provided their neighbours with central processing, planting material and advice, that government extension did not fill the gap when they went, and that poorer parchment and lower prices followed. Surveys compiled by the handbook found plantation yields averaging about 1,650 kilograms of green bean a hectare between 1960 and 1995, against about 950 for smallholders.

Pressures on the sector

• Rain. The handbook attributes much of the year-to-year variation in the crop since 1980 to export prices and annual rainfall, and says high rainfall in 2005 produced a poor harvest in 2006.
• More rain in future. The same handbook, writing in 2009, listed increasing rainfall associated with global climate change as a possible limit on expanding production. It is a possibility raised by its authors, not a measured trend.
• The coffee berry borer, present since 2017 and, on the research reports' account, not eradicable.
• Quality at the farm. Most smallholder coffee is paid as Y1, and the reports trace that to fermentation, washing and drying done with little equipment.
• Roads and airstrips. The handbook names deteriorating road access as a limit on production since 2000; in remote valleys coffee is carried out on foot.
• Labour and returns to it. Households told researchers that labour was among their main constraints, and where there are roads vegetables and fruit pay better for the time.
• Old trees and low yields. In 2024 focus groups reported most trees as 15 years old or more.
• Theft of cherry, which the Coffee Industry Corporation gives as the reason for the rule it gazetted in 2008 restricting the roadside trade in cherry in five highland provinces.

Both statements are from one handbook published in 2009. No climate study of Papua New Guinea's coffee areas was read.

Institutions worth knowing

• Coffee Industry Corporation Ltd (CIC) — the regulator, based in Goroka. On its own account it began as the Coffee Marketing Board in 1963, became the Coffee Industry Board in 1976 and then the corporation; it licenses dealers and exporters, controls export quality from an office in Lae, publishes prices and statistics from processors' and exporters' compulsory returns, and runs extension from 14 provincial offices
• The corporation's research division at Aiyura, Eastern Highlands Province — adaptive research and services to growers, with substations in Western Highlands and at Omuru in Madang Province
• Licensed processors and exporters — the private firms that buy parchment, mill it and ship it. The corporation says it has left marketing to them and concentrated on regulation

Explore Papua New Guinea's coffee from here

A reading order, not a list of everything related: each step picks up something this page raised and takes it further.

1. Step 1Coffee pests and diseasesWhat the coffee berry borer does inside a cherry, and why clean picking is the control a low-input farm can afford.
2. Step 2Washed processingThe method a highland household carries out by hand, and where fermentation can go wrong.
3. Step 3Coffee grading and qualityHow defect counts become a grade, which is the difference between the Y price and the A price here.
4. Step 4TypicaThe tall, hardy variety the research found smallholders keeping in preference to higher-yielding dwarfs.
5. Step 5CatimorThe rust-tolerant dwarf that is recommended in Papua New Guinea only where rust is serious, and why it asks more of a farm.
6. Step 6IndonesiaThe neighbour across the land border, with a very different mix of species and a different way of processing arabica.
7. Step 7Coffee economics and price formationWhy a grower who sells parchment at the roadside sees a small part of an export price.
8. Step 8Tasting LabTaste a coffee from here beside another washed arabica and record what differs, without a national flavour note to steer you.