Trip to Central Aceh

So I have been out in the field a good amount lately, hence not being able to put much up here. The ‘field’ is an interesting place to go, but after the first visit the immense boredom of actually getting to and from it, really puts a damper on the experience. There are not a lot of main roads in the province and there is one that runs across Aceh’s North Coast and through our project area—250 km of top-heavy semis, mini buses, bicycles, motor scooters, and daredevil goats ebbing and flowing (but mostly abruptly and unpredictably stopping) every which way across two lanes of blacktop. It takes a very long time to go anywhere and the scenery is a sun shimmering mixture of clear cut forest (dotted by the occasional timber protection tower, a hilarious feature that proves, as my boss pointed out, “Well, he did a pretty shitty job.”), banana plantations, and fish ponds.

Last weekend I had the good fortune of going to Takengon, in Central Aceh, to do some research, specifically on the coffee economy, on an area where my NGO may extend their programming. Central Aceh is coffee growing highland (1000 meters and up!) and produces some absurd percentage (I heard as high as 90%) of Indonesia’s total Arabica export. So, in more than just a way, I saw firsthand the coffee that will soon help to bring you the venti lattes you (and America) love so much; mostly there were dogs sleeping on it.

One of the most interesting things I learned about coffee is that in Indonesia it is a highly decentralized industry. There are no sprawling coffee estates, large scale collectives, or economies of scale. Instead, coffee is a family level livelihood, with small plots (something like 65,000 ha are under cultivation by 60,000 families) producing piddling yearly yields of about 500 kg/ha. Considering that unwashed, organic Arabica sells for about $3.85/kg, this seems a precarious existence. (I also could not help but wonder when the rest of the money ends up when I buy the coffee for $30/kg in Cambridge.)

The other unexpected thing that I learned was that people do not really take very good care of this coffee. I had heard that Sumatran coffees were among the most inconsistent in the world, and now I understand why. Farmers, angling for better prices, often try to perform themselves as much of the processing as they can. This leads to them pulping (separating the fruit, called the cherry) with ancient hand cranks and drying the coffee (to convert it from ‘wet parchment’ to ‘dry parchment’—parchment meaning that the inner seed case is still attached, ie pre-hulling) on the ground beside the road. Exhaust and dirt shower the coffee all day, school children walk over it on the way to school, dogs sleep on it all afternoon (it reminds me of a Brookstone ergonomic bed for doggies), the children stomp back over it on the way home. No one seems at all concerned about any of this.

The region itself was one of the most beautiful places I have been in Indonesia, complete with towering mountains, cool coffee groves pinched into every nook and gully, an active volcano, a 26 km long mountain lake, less Islam than found in the Aceh lying at sea level, and some fantastic afternoon thunder storms.

Central Aceh, like most of the province, is post-conflict (I may have mentioned this before, but Aceh has a long history of rebellion, the most recent incarnation against Suharto’s natural resource plundering, Java-dominated centralism) and between 1995 and 2002 50% of the residents were displaced, usually by force. What I found was one of the most chronically left behind places in Indonesia, with an infant mortality rate of 47 per 1,000 live births (Indonesia’s figure, by contrast, is a none too rosy 32), a complete lack of basic sanitation, a large problem with disaffected young men who had their school disrupted by the conflict, and a staggeringly high incidence of trauma (it is estimated that half the people have post-traumatic stress disorder) from the tactics of both the guerillas and Indonesian military. If I know one thing about developing communities it is that idle, young dudes never portend anything good, and many are concerned the peace might not last.

Takengon, in some ways, is a sad place to be. In terms of toilet facilities, schools are particularly lacking and girls often stop attending for this reason. Last month someone settled an old conflict score by locking 5 men in a building and burning it down. There is a lot of overheated rhetoric surrounding the creation of a new province and how it will be akin to an ethnic partition (the area now is tri-ethnic: Acehnese, Javanese, and Gayonese). However, there are some bright spots: the people are much more genuine than the lowland Acehnese and it is close to the only beggar free place I have ever encountered in Indonesia. Usually intersections are trolled by children who surround the cars—often surreptitiously pulling an arm into their shirt—wailing for money, usually as their ‘pimp’ leans on a lamppost waiting for the take. In Central Aceh I did not see any of this, and as one of the government ministers I met with explained to me, society seems to have reached a collective sense of dignity and decided that the children in Central Aceh have already been through enough.