AAAK Cooperative

Community Context

The late Brian Kuglame was the longtime General Manager of the AAK Cooperative, a group of 64 communities from across Papua New Guinea’s Highlands. These are 64 different “house-lines”— single-family villages, each with distinct languages and traditions uniquely, bound by few things other than a local dialect called Tok Pisin and their membership in AAK. The name itself stands for Apo, Angra, and Kange—the words for “Unity” in three major local languages. Few organizations in PNG have so successfully brought so many disparate groups together, much less kept them together for a meaningful duration, despite some inevitable dispersion following Kuglame’s passing.

Outside a handful of well-known estates, PNG coffee is overwhelmingly smallholder-grown, with middlemen playing an outsized role in moving cherry down from remote highland villages. While middlemen extend access, they also complicate the link between producer and buyer, making quality promotion more difficult. Cooperative export structures have always been challenged by PNG’s linguistic and cultural diversity as well as the sheer remoteness of many of its villages, but AAK stands as proof of this model’s potential.

2023 Efforts To Incentivize Drying, Storage And Shipping Improvements

For the 2023 harvest, we’re supporting two AAK cluster groups in Angra (Koglai, Waingar) and one in Apo (Kosionte) with wet mill support and will be providing a commercial Draminksi moisture meter and IR temperature gun to monitor drying more closely and help coffee from these cluster groups achieve greater stability. We’ll also be providing tubs for cherry flotation (they’re currently using buckets) as well as tin roofing sheets for their sheds. For Kosionte (Apo), Nupagimi (Apo), Kerefa (Apo), and Keiya (Apo) cluster groups, we’ll be providing roofing sheets and other materials for their storage sheds. Currently, those sheds are built with bush materials which are quickly deteriorating.

Because almost one third of the coffee sold in 2022 were freighted from remote flying zones, we’re setting up a revolving fund for air freight from remote regions to consolidation for export. We will provide initial funding for the first round of coffee deliveries; when that coffee is sold the charter fund will be recouped back to book for the next charter.

Finally, we’ll be offering a premium over current market pricing paid based on the volume of clean/specialty quality coffee delivered. This is meant to support properly cleaned, properly dried, and properly stored/handled coffee and to incentivize producers to dry their coffee down to 10-10.5% moisture. In addition to the tools we’re going to provide, we’re providing a detailed Coffee Drying Best Practices guide, which AAK can share across all clusters in order to promote more delivery of specialty grade in order to increase the amount of per-lb premium paid.