Hard for Indonesian Coffee to Enter World Market
Friday, 03 July, 2009 | 13:31 WIB

TEMPO Interactive, Jakarta: It is difficult for coffee products from Indonesia to meet world demand. This is because about 92 percent of Indonesian coffee varieties are Robusta while 70 percent of coffee consumers in the world are consumers of Arabica coffee.

Surip Mawardi, an expert from the Indonesian Coffee and Cacao Research Center (ICCRI), explained that Arabica coffee can only grow on land that is 2,000 feet above the sea surface.

“Indonesia has limited high lands. Some of them are forests that are forbidden for coffee,” he said yesterday (2/7).

Some 82 percent of coffee farming lands in Indonesia (1.1 million hectare) is planted with Robusta coffee and 18 percent (241,000 hectare) with Arabica coffee.

VENNIE MELYANI