Papua New Guinea, AAK Cooperative

Eastern Highlands, Papua New Guinea

Brian Kuglame is the General Manager of the AAK Cooperative, a group of 64 communities from across the highlands region. That's 64 different 'house-lines', single-family villages each with languages and traditions uniquely their own. What they have in common is a pidgin called Tok Pisin, and membership in the AAK Cooperative. AAK stands for Apo, Angra and Kange – the word for ‘Unity’ in the three major local languages. Coffee brings the world together in more ways than one. AAK is the only cooperative in PNG to unify so many disparate tribes, and they are proud of the role that coffee plays in promoting unity.

In Papua New Guinea, most coffee is produced by smallholder farms in the Highlands, where production is often low-scale and lacks specialty quality. While middlemen facilitate access to remote areas, they can hinder direct quality promotion between buyers and sellers. The Highlands, renowned for its high-altitude coffee, features various producer formats, from small cooperatives to larger estates. Crop to Cup emphasizes smallholder coffees, which, despite lower yields, play a significant role in the country's coffee output.

Typically, smallholder farmers process coffee by hand and sell to local collectors, resulting in lower quality. However, specialty coffee is increasingly sourced from well-managed washing stations that enhance quality through careful processing. Emerging cooperatives and traceable producer groups are producing high-quality coffee, though their growth is constrained by cultural and geopolitical challenges.