04/10/2025

LYFE SATURDAY | OCT 4, 2025

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Brazil’s Jacu bird specialty coffee poo-poos US tariffs

B RAZIL’S coffee sector is going through a stinky time amid punitive US tariffs but a specialty coffee that passes through the digestive tract of the exotic Jacu bird is emerging from the muck-flinging without undue distress. US President Donald Trump imposed a 50% tariff on Brazilian goods in early August, amid a spat with Brazil’s leftist leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. It was a powerful blow to Brazil’s premium coffee brands, which had Americans as their most avid consumers. But as Brazil’s premium coffee exports began to fall sharply, one peculiar brew defied the downturn by appealing to Japanese, British and, increasingly, Brazilian consumers, hinting that the country’s specialty coffee future may depend on reaching beyond its biggest traditional market. Americans, on the other hand, do not have much of a taste for Jacu bird coffee, a high-end Arabica that is eaten, digested and defecated by a fowl native to Brazil’s Atlantic Forest before being turned into a brew. “Americans... don’t have the same vision as the Japanese, the Asians, people from Saudi Arabia, the Europeans, of looking for this type of quality,” Henrique Sloper, the producer of Jacu Bird coffee, told reporters. “So, for us, it doesn’t affect anything in the specific case of this product.” Jacu Bird coffee is prized for its floral aroma and balanced acidity, qualities that stem from the beans’ absorbent nature and the bird’s digestive process, according to Rogerio Lemke, agriculture supervisor at Fazenda Camocim, the farm behind its production. “The Jacu doesn’t just eat coffee, it eats fruit too, and inside its craw, the coffee bean absorbs the characteristics of these fruits into the bean as well,” Lemke said as he stood before drying Jacu poop, filled with coffee beans. Other brazilian coffees suffer The Jacus that roam the coffee groves of Fazenda Camocim are a species of Penelope, large fruit-eating birds THE rib eye steak that Matthieu Msellati was tucking into at a restaurant in Tchibanga in southwestern Gabon unusually came from a cattle ranch less than 50km away. Eating locally sourced food is still a rarity in the oil-rich central African country, which imports almost everything it eats but has a growing appetite for that to change. On social media, use of the “consogab” hashtag showing support for eating and promoting Gabonese products has grown in recent months. The only large-scale cattle farming business in Gabon is the Grande Mayumba Development Company, which owns the Nyanga ranch, where Msellati’s steak came from. Forest covers 88% of Gabon’s 267,000 square kilometres, while savannahs – the large, flat, grassy spaces necessary for cattle to graze – account for just 7%. Stretching more than 100,000 hectares to the border with the Republic of Congo, the Nyanga farm is Gabon’s only one involved in large-scale beef production. Its 5,000 heads of cattle roam in a natural pasture of vast plains, fed on tall grass and watered by the Nyanga River, which crosses the farm.

o Peculiar brew inspired by Indonesia’s kopi luwak defies downturn, counts on popularity in Japan, Europe, Brazil

Workers pick leaves and sticks from freshly harvested coffee cherries at the farm.

Clusters of coffee beans caked in bird droppings are laid out for drying at the Camocim farm in Pedra Azul. – PICS FROM REUTERS

producer, to the US, the world’s largest consumer of the beverage, were down almost 70% versus July, according to the Brazilian Specialty Coffee Association. While the association has not yet published any export figures for September, the situation for Brazil’s specialty coffee remains ruinous, Marcio Ferreira, the president of Brazil’s coffee exporters group, Cecafe, said recently. “The biggest drop in Brazilian coffee imports was in specialty coffees,”

found across Latin America. The farm got the idea to enlist their help after watching them peck at ripe coffee cherries and recalling Indonesia’s famous kopi luwak coffee, made from beans that pass through the digestive system of civets. Yet, while Jacu Bird coffee, which can go for up to £960 (RM5,440) a kilo, has not seen sales affected, the same cannot be said for the rest of Brazil’s specialty coffee sector. August exports of specialty coffee from Brazil, the world’s top coffee

A Jacu bird stands at the farm.

annual production, added Sloper, the farm’s chief executive. “America is the largest coffee market on the planet (and) we’re not entering America. In the short term, it’s very bad, but in the medium and long term, it might force us to open other markets,” he said. – Reuters

Ferreira said, citing the impact of tariffs on specialty beans’ premium cost. So while Jacu Bird coffee’s geographical spread means it has dodged Trump’s tariffs, the charges represent a challenging moment for Fazenda Camocim’s other coffees, which make up the majority of its

Import-reliant Gabon gets taste for local beef

A chef prepares beef inside the hotel’s kitchen.

From slaughter at the ranch to delivery takes less than 72 hours, nearly 12 of which are spent travelling 700km along tracks and rough roads. In his white overalls, his butcher’s knife at the ready, Ori gets to work chopping up the meat. “One or two weeks without arrival and people start asking ‘Where’s the meat that is more tender?’” Ori said. He supplies mostly Libreville restaurant owners, whose diners already have a taste for home-grown produce. “We tell them it’s meat from Gabon and it comes from Tchibanga and they’re happy when they hear it’s their product,” he added. – AFP

While small, Dibanganga acknowledged that “its yield isn’t very high”. But with the ranch’s livestock numbers growing around 10% a year, its beef is no longer just being enjoyed at nearby restaurants but in the capital too. ‘Fresh meat’ Butcher Youssouf Ori takes delivery every fortnight at dawn of around 300kg of carcasses brought in a refrigerated lorry to his shop in a business district of the capital Libreville. In front of his store in Charbonnages, a sign in big letters reads: “Fresh Meat”. compact and

Beef on plates served to guests at the Iniva Relais de la Nyanga Hotel in Tchibanga. – PICS FROM AFP

self-sufficiency,“ Dibanganga said. Production at the ranch is projected to hit 30 tonnes this year, a modest figure explained by the breed of cattle: the N’Dama. Native to west and central Africa, its orange colour blends in with the reddish-brown earth tracks typical of the region. The breed is favoured for its resistance to trypanosomiasis, a disease transmitted by the tsetse fly equivalent to sleeping sickness in humans.

“It’s meat produced locally in organic conditions,” Gui-Lov Dibanganga, 38, Nyanga ranch manager who heads a team of 108 staff, said. Food self-sufficiency Besides nearby Chad and Cameroon, Gabon imports beef from far-flung Brazil and France. “The ranch is part of this vision of wanting to significantly reduce beef imports in order to help the country reach this objective of food