Images above: Mr and Mrs Sugimoto at the Coffee Plantation, at Teomaville, on Efate island.
Written By Len Garae, Daily Post Newspaper Friday 10th November, 2017:
Lucrative days are coming for coffee farmers in Shefa Province and Tafea Province, after the Vanuatu Tourism Office participated in a JICA funded training in July this year.
A Japanese investor Jun Sugimoto is in Port Vila making plans through the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, to collect a 10 kilo sample of raw Arabica Coffee to take home to Okinawa in Japan.
A prominent investor with a string of coffee shops in Japan, Sugimoto indicates once his customers confirm their thirst for Vanuatu Coffee, he is planning to return to Port Vila next year to finalise plans to import coffee from Vanuatu, to open a coffee shop selling Vanuatu coffee.
Shefa Province’s Senior Agriculture Officer Willie Iau and his team have met with the investor and assured him they are going to help facilitate his agri-tourism investment queries, to arrange for ten kilos of raw beans for him to take home.
Smiling with eagerness to use Arabica coffee from Tanna, Epi or Efate, the Japanese investor spoke with preference to import direct from coffee cooperatives.
He says in this way coffee farmers will be well paid for their beans. Also the investor and his wife enjoyed a field trip to a 2,500 tree coffee farm at Teouma this week.
The couple had not seen fresh coffee beans on a tree before. They grinned from head to toe with their first sight of ripe coffee beans on a dwarf tree. They helped themselves to the beans and peeled them to see what the beans really looked like.
Not only that but it was clear the couple had not been to a tropical farm before, even though Sugimoto says he has a coffee farm in Uganda, Africa. He ended up asking more questions about other crops than coffee.
Willie Iau was as energetic as the Jun Sugimoto and implied a potential breakthrough for agri-tourism with coffee to the Japanese market.
He said physical evidence proves that coffee is not a new crop on Efate and that coffee as an industry, was very much alive during the colonial era.
Today you can still see ancient coffee plantations in the islands as well as a place in Port Vila which is still called “Coffee”, even though shops and commercial building have sprung up where the coffee plantation used to be.
Iau challenges all custom landowners of ancient coffee plantations in the islands to replant the sites with new coffee seedlings.
There are stocks of Arabica coffee seedlings at Tagabe.
A new plantation of coffee starts bearing flowers at three years old while some plantations before that depending on the quality of the soil.
Regarding the coffee farm at Teoma, the first harvest yielded ten kilos, followed by 40 kilos during the second harvest. Iau says the trees will reach their peak for the next fifteen years. Estimating an annual harvest of 500 kilo at Vt270 per kilo, Iau says it is possible for the young couple to earn Vt2 million a year.
Sugimoto’s visit is the result of a JICA-sponsored six weeks training that Vanuatu Tourism Office staff member Alcina Charley attended in Japan mid this year.
