Cordillera brew fuels generations
FROM HOMEGROWN BEANS Demand for coffee grew more during the pandemic when young Cordillerans began roasting, packing and selling homegrown coffee beans online. Soon they put up their own gourmet coffee shops. These days, small coffee stalls have sprouted in local markets and alleys for residents. —Photos by Neil Clark Ongchangco
LA TRINIDAD, BENGUET, Philippines — In the 1970s, people would gather at corner stalls for a cup of coffee after finishing their market errands, whether in Baguio, in the Mountain Province capital of Bontoc, or in La Trinidad in Benguet, the province where one of the finest and most flavorful arabica beans are grown in the country.
However, the marketing of arabica coffee began to gain momentum in the 1990s, as coffee makers turned home brewing into an affordable luxury, according to Valentino Macanes, a professor and researcher at Benguet State University here.
Most backyards in Benguet grow arabica trees solely for personal consumption, he said.
As Metro Manila’s chief supplier of vegetables, Benguet has grown a lucrative industry out of salad vegetables like cabbage and lettuce, which are planted in gardens carved from mountainsides. But becoming an equally robust trade as vegetables has been a bit of a struggle for coffee growers in the Cordillera.
The high altitude has been hospitable to the arabica, which has a sweet aftertaste, and the stronger robusta thriving in Kalinga province, but the mountains have insufficient farm areas for commercial coffee production, said Macanes, who serves as director of his university’s Institute of Highland Farmer System and Agroforestry.
Article continues after this advertisementMany commercial coffee trees are grown under the canopies of rainforests, he said.
Article continues after this advertisementSide hustle
Farmers consider coffee trees as a side hustle, Macanes pointed out.
“It takes three years for a new coffee tree to mature and become harvestable. It only takes two to three months for farmers to harvest vegetables which are sold quickly,” he said.
Yet upland coffee remains a key component of the Philippine Coffee Roadmap, which the Department of Agriculture (DA) and the Department Trade and Industry drew up to improve the Philippines’ performance in the world coffee market.
The 2017-2022 roadmap worked out production enhancement programs and market scenarios to raise the Philippines’ ranking after it placed 25th among the top coffee global producers in 2014 which was led by Brazil, data from the Food and Agriculture Organization showed.
The country produced 37,727 metric tons (MT) of green coffee beans that year compared to Brazil’s 2,804,070 MT.
As of 2022, the Philippines produced 58,285 MT of green coffee beans (only 1 percent of the world’s 10,782,334 MT production), according to data supplied by Miriam Pastor, point person for high-value crops at the DA Cordillera. The Cordillera generated 997.83 MT of the Philippines’ 2022 production, which was grown in 5,162.11 hectares of upland farms.
Records place 1714 as the year Spanish Franciscan missionaries introduced coffee to what is now Lipa City in Batangas province, Macanes said.
By the early 1800s, the southern Tagalog region had coffee barons, many of them given the honorific “Don,” who dominated the market during that period, he said.
Arabica was brought to the Cordillera in the 19th century through the trade lane called the Spanish Trail which snakes through Benguet, Mountain Province and the borders of Ifugao, said Macanes, citing a historical account of Benguet arabica written by the Agnep Heritage Farm.
First introduced to Galliano (or Gallano, now La Union province’s Aringay town) by military Gov. Manuel Scheidnagel in 1875, arabica was transplanted in 1877 “to the plateaus at an altitude of 1,219 meters above sea level, or masl (4,000 feet) to 1,524 masl (5000 feet)” by the succeeding governor, Enrique Oraqa, who “distributed seeds among the people of the barrios of the province,” the Agnep paper says, drawing from Spanish accounts compiled by the 1903 Census of the Philippine Islands of the American colonial government.
Coffee became the subject of dispute when another Spanish governor tried to force Benguet communities to expand their plantations in 1888. The directive triggered an uprising in a community called Daklan where people tried to destroy the coffee trees, Macanes said, “but the plants sprouted back.”
Benguet communities like Kabayan town soon embraced backyard coffee trees. The beans were roasted over open fire and, when brewed as a morning beverage, “produced a smokey flavor people seemed to like,” Macanes said, which many modern Benguet households still practice.
Currency
Macanes said coffee beans were so highly valued these were used as currency to pay local workers.
This still applies to some households in the region, he said. “These trees are sometimes how families cope when times are hard. They sometimes pay rent or tuition using coffee beans which is why their children still keep these trees around,” Macanes said.
Commercial demand for arabica and upland robusta grew at the turn of this century, when gourmet coffee shops started to proliferate in Metro Manila and major cities, including Baguio,between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, Macanes said.
Top coffee suppliers began trooping here, he said, including manufacturers of popular powdered coffee brands.
“They met with our bigger coffee farmers. But they immediately caved when they could not produce enough supply to fill up monthly orders for arabica,” Macanes said.
Benguet coffee again found its resurgence during the COVID-19 pandemic because young Ibaloy and Kankana-ey began packaging and selling arabica online and have put up start-up cafes for young consumers who love brewed coffee, he said. This trend applies to other Cordillera provinces, including Kalinga’s capital city of Tabuk.
Some of these young entrepreneurs have been roasting coffee beans harvested straight from their own backyard trees or larger farms, Macanes said. But limited supplies meant many of these coffee hubs could not expand, he said, because the average cluster of backyard trees could only generate about 2 kilos of beans.
Production
A survey conducted by DA’s second Cordillera Highland Agricultural Resource Management Project tallied 1,944,947 coffee trees in the mountain region, and 1,021,940 of these are fruit-bearing, with the biggest concentrations in Kalinga (37 percent), Mountain Province (24 percent) and Benguet (20 percent).
But as of last year, Benguet still contributed 61 percent of the region’s green coffee bean production, with Kalinga (21 percent) and Ifugao (11 percent) trailing behind. Arabica represents 60 percent of the 2023 total production, followed by robusta (38 percent), and 1 percent each of the “liberica” and “excelsa” varieties.
Back in 2012, entrepreneur Pacita “Chit” Juan observed that coffee production nationwide has been dropping despite an increase in coffee consumption by Filipinos. That year, Juan served as chair of the Philippine Coffee Board.
That downtrend is reflected in DA Cordillera data. From 2014 to 2023, coffee production slid down to its lowest of 797.94 MT in 2019, picking up slightly to 1,003.13 MT in 2020 which was when the pandemic broke out. Production again dropped to 997.83 MT in 2022, before rising to 1,013.62 MT last year.
The DA has been spending for the rejuvenation of older coffee trees to jump-start harvest, from 69,131 old coffee trees located in nine sites in 2017 to 7,500 old coffee trees located in 12 sites in 2021. The agency also invested in pulpers, roasters, and even hermetic bags so farms can grow, process and package their beans.
Ancestral lands
Macanes said the government had yet to tap another resource that is often neglected: ancestral domains.
Most indigenous communities in Cordillera towns have ancestral domain titles issued by the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples to recognize their communal property which are watersheds or forestlands.
Macanes said domain owners could introduce coffee as their economic industry to their respective ancestral domain sustainable development and protection plan. These vast forests could serve as local hubs for coffee plantations and would easily triple Cordillera production once the coffee trees mature, he said.
Private companies have also tried to introduce coffee trees within Baguio forests, like the pine tree canopies of Camp John Hay.
The potential increase in production to be provided by ancestral lands should keep the businesses put up by IP children going by a hundred years, Macanes said.
