Business
Tonga's Royal Coffee Strikes Gold
But there's not enough to meet demand
Paul Karalus has struck a problem all too familiar with Pacific Islands manufacturers. He’s struck gold but can’t produce enough of it, not yet, to supply what the customers want. In this case, it is coffee.
Karalus and his wife Tafolosa have struck gold by reviving Tonga’s commercial coffee growing business. A Taiwan importer wants five to six containers of the coffee a year. That equates to 70 tonnes.
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In 2000, says Karalus, his company, South Seas Coffee Ltd, produced one tonne. Last year, it hit 2.4 tonnes and this year it expects to produce five tonnes. Next year’s output is forecast to be 12 tonnes.
It will take three years to reach 70 tonnes, Karalus says. Meanwhile, everything the company produces is being snapped up in Tonga apart from small quantities sold to coffee shops in New Zealand and Australia.
It is the quality of Royal Coffee, as it is being marketed, that appeals to coffee shop proprietors. It appeals to the adventuresome palates of the burgeoning global crowd of coffee connoisseurs. It’s angling for that market.
Karalus says apart from the packaged ground product, he hopes to create export customs for roasted beans to be supplied on the condition that they are not used for blending with other varieties and that it does not lose its Tongan branding.
Tonga’s dependency on agriculture is heavy. But the range of its exportable products is painfully narrow. Coffee could become an important export commodity for it.
In the late 19th century, Tonga’s then government ordered all land holders to grow a minimum of 500 cotton and 50 coffee plants. That was done and remnants of those coffee plantings had survived, but neither coffee nor cotton were taken up on a commercial basis.
New Zealand and France began assistance for coffee growers in the 1970s. By the late 1990s, more than 20,000 trees were producing and more than 1500 kilogrammes of beans were being roasted for local use.
About 40 smallholders were harvesting 50 to 800 trees by the late 1990s. When a French aid scheme concluded in 1999, Karalus set up South Seas Coffee, purchased equipment from the agricultural department, and obtained the support of the last French coffee advisor, Guenael Le Guillox, under a technical help from the European Union’s Centre for the Development of Industry.
The company began a 10-year expansion of the industry. It expects to have 100,000 trees planted by itself and smallholders by the end of this year, with this number to be increased annually by 50,000 trees. South Seas Coffee expects to be producing 80,000 to 100,000 kilogrammes for export by 2010.
Karalus, long established in Tonga as an airline and business manager, says the company is working on a vanilla-flavoured roast.
Tonga’s vanilla production was formerly quite significant, but in the early 1990s a combination of hurricane damage and low vanilla prices reduced output drastically. Many disillusioned vanilla growers tore up their vines to turn to growing kava.
Now that the kava trade has collapsed and vanilla prices are soaring, former vanilla growers are kicking themselves, Karalus says.
