Papua New Guinea’s coffee industry is based upon tens of thou- sands of small village coffee gardens. Typically, they range in size from 20 trees to 500 or 600. These family-owned coffee gardens produce over 70% of the country’s annual exportable crop; a crop which has averaged one million bags, or 60,000 tonnes per year in recent times. It is estimated that nearly 2,000,000 people, or almost half of the nation’s population, de- rive a benefit from the coffee industry. The coffee crop is ‘green gold’ which enriches the country annually to the extent of three to four hundred million kina in overseas earnings. It is PNG’s most valuable agricultural export. And it is an eternally renew- able resource.

In the early 1950s an active policy of encouraging the establish- ment of village coffee gardens was initiated, particularly in the highlands where the environment is ideal for the growing of Ara- bica coffee. By 1960 more than 4000 hectares of Arabica coffee has been established by villagers, mainly in the highlands near Kainantu, Goroka, Mount Hagen and in the Wahgi Valley. By the early 1970s, the area planted by villagers had increased to an estimated 23,000 hectares producing some 25,000 tonnes of green bean (raw bean) for export each year.
During the 1960s the infrastructural base of today’s industry was laid. Early on, all the coffee produced in the highlands was flown to Madang for overseas shipment. Initially, two coffee mills in which the dried coffee was husked, graded and bagged, were established, one in Goroka and one in Mount Hagen. The num- ber of mills set up to buy and process the fast-growing volume of coffee produced by the smallholders soon grew to 10. By 1964, the Highlands Highway was sufficiently well-developed to make trucking a payable proposition and the use of the aeroplane as the principal means of transporting heavy freight in and out of the highlands was phased out. At the same time the develop- ment of a spreading network of minor roads in the coffee- growing areas allowing easier access to the towns encouraged the industry to grow. Many coffee growers used their new found wealth to buy small trucks and began to engage in buying coffee from other farmers, selling it at a profit to the mills.