Cocoa and Copra: Karkar's Second Currencies

The first night I arrived on Karkar, now over a year ago, our team leapt down from the back of our transport to meet a welcoming party lead by an old man wearing little more than a thong made of a few leaves, a bit of bark and a bright pink plastic bag—and a sprouted coconut, tied ball-and-chain style to his left ankle.

The cultural roots of the coconut run deep here—if not the roots of the coconuts themselves. The tambuna (origin) story of the sweet-meaty fruit varies with the storyteller, but all draw upon the similar features of a husked coconut’s three “eyes” with the features of a human face. My favorite:

Once two brothers went out to catch fish in their canoe. The canoe overturned and they found themselves surrounded by sharks. The elder brother, fearing that they would both be eaten, directed the younger to cut off his arm and feed it to the sharks as the brothers began to swim to shore. He did this, but the sharks followed and the shore was still far off. The elder brother continued to order the younger to cut and feed his limbs to the shark until finally the younger brother reached the shore, left with just the head of his brother. He planted the head, which grew into the coconut and continues to bear fruit in the likeness of a head to this day.

Dried coconut (copra) is used in almost every recipe, from creamed rice and greens to fish and pumpkin stew and popo (papaya) cake. Fresh green coconut (kulau) is a deliciously-sweet refreshing drink with levels of rehydration salts on par with Gatorade. I (and the rest of Karkar) am addicted to both and reaping the benefits: clear smooth skin, a boost in antioxidants, and lower levels of stress. No kidding! Used as an exfoliant, scrapped coconut meat is a great acne treatment (a trial had remarkable results on the mysterious backne plaguing two in the group) and a compound in the meat is reported to reduce levels of cortisol, the hormone the body produces when stressed. (Finally, a biological answer to the phenomenon of PNG time!)

So integral is the coconut to life here, even my Western-wise friend Christine asked me today where we get our coconuts to cook with if they don’t grow in the US; she was sure we must be importing large quantities of such an important staple.

Plantations (“line coconas” in Pidgin) and the concept of growing coconuts for commerce were, not surprisingly, ideas brought by missionaries and expats. The first profiteers arrived in the 40’s just after the war. Plantations now cover the majority of Karkar’s coastline and large swaths reach up the base of the volcano. The two largest, Biabi and Kulili have made their owners millionaires. The vast majority of the others has much less acreage and is owned privately by individual families. Buai is the official “second currency” of PNG, but at least on Karkar, it’s the price of copra that determines a family’s income for the year.

There are two ways to get paid for the grueling labor of collecting, husking, cracking, desiccating, and pounding the fallen coconuts into their canvas sacks. Working for a large plantation like Biabi or Kulili, a man—or more often, woman—makes a pitiful 60-65 kina a fortnight. Working your own plantation, you get paid by the bags, which must be bought by one of the two plantations on the island that own cargo boats—which double as passenger “ferries”—that provide the only mode of transport off the island. Unfortunately, a 100 kg bag of copra that last year fetched 50 kina is currently going for as little as 30, which is having a devastating impact on many families.

Students join their parents in the plantations during their school holidays to collect the fallen coconuts to raise money for school fees. This year’s deflated price means students are having trouble coming up with the 250 kina for annual tuition. If they can’t pay be the end of the year, most schools will refuse to promote them to the next grade regardless of their class performance.
As Christine pointed out when I asked her for a forecast of Karkar’s development, it seems that one of the first projects villages should invest in is a ferry boat for public use so that small plantation owners could reach a competitive group of buyers/distributors. Not to mention, the island’s tourism would get a real boost from a legit passenger ferry. (Eager to avoid the grueling 5- or 6-hour slow-boat-to-Madang, I’ve opted to take the hour speed boat route directly across the channel to upload these entries. Calm seas made the first two trips absolutely pleasant, but the most recent left me sodden and salty and kept the skipper’s mate scooping water from the boat for the duration of the trip. Thankfully, we threw my bag and computer inside a cooler to keep it dry.)

While the coconuts are the most readily visible cash crop on the island, a second flurishes beneath them. Trees of cocoa, the bean crushed to make chocolate, conveniently thrive between their loft palm neighbors. The beans grow in about 6-in. long and 3-in. wide pods, packed next to each other in a viscous sweet white membrane (well worth a suck and far more appetizing than the dried bean itself). Bond, the operations manager for Biabi’s cocoa production, gave us a tour of the processing facility one afternoon. The beans, pulled from their pods and separated, are thrown into square meter holding boxes to dry. Each day the beans are turned by shoveling them into the next waiting box. At the end of a week, the beans are spread on the hole-punched drying platform where heat from a furnace rises through the holes to roast the beans. The finished product is sorted by machine and then by hand to separate the good from the bad. The first time I tasted a bean, I spit it out, disgusted by the bitter taste and choking from the cloying smell of sweat in the dryer. But trying Bond’s beans this year, I was pleasantly surprised to find them more akin to very dark, dry unsweetened chocolate.

Like copra, the idea for growing cocoa is completely colonialist. In this case to the extent that the plant didn’t even exist on Karkar prior to the 1950’s. To this day no one has tried to incorporate cocoa into the local cuisine, and to my personal dismay, no one has a recipe for chocolate itself. The treat is found on the island only in the form of the imported Milo drink favored by children. Noumea, the German exporter that buys much of Karkar’s chocolate, doesn’t distribute in PNG. (Though I imagine in the heat, it wouldn’t hold up well if they tried.) I’m not sure you can find it outside Germany, actually, and the website doesn’t provide any ordering information.

Yet another crop grows on the ground beneath the copra: vanilla, which was imported and planted after a tsunami devastated Madagascar a decade ago. Unfortunately, when Madagascar recovered, the prices weren’t worth coming back to harvest the vanilla on Karkar. Last year, Christa and I mistakenly thought that given the price American’s pay for sticks of fresh vanilla on US shelves, the wholesale prices must have recovered and we’d hoped to find some fair trade buyers for Karkar’s abundance, but we were sadly mistaken. But the idea of using it to produce boutique soaps or hand crèmes I think might still be worthwhile, if we could a cohort of interested women entrepreneurs and a recipe.

The more likely event however is for another expat to set up shop, as has been the case for every other crop on the island. Such is the nature of colonialism, investment, and free markets, I know. But if I have one wish for Karkar it is that the students we educate today will tomorrow be able to find PNG investors to back their own business schemes. Already microfinance is making this happen on a small scale, but for PNG to assert itself as a player in the global economy, it needs businessmen, or ideally, a business community rather than a single individual, to work and profit from their own resources. But before that can happen we need honest investment from top-level politicians in their own people. And Michael Sumare, accepting Chinese money (or bribes as many call it) to open new mines, industrial parks, and other ventures is not setting a good example. (Rumor here has it that a private business deal with the Kumbukari mine owners will keep the mine opening on track despite a court order to close it.)

I don’t mean to say that outside investment and investors should not be major players in PNG development, but they should not be the only players. And right now, at least on Karkar, few locals have been empowered or funded to sell their products to anyone beside an expat middleman or to found a business of their own. But like the chocolate this island produces (but never consumes), there is sweet potential for a bitter bean with the addition of a few more ingredients.