Satellite
  • Day 421

    More on drugs

    February 10, 2021 in Uganda ⋅ ☁️ 31 °C

    At the edge of Kibale Forest I search for traces of the Kibale Forest Coffee Project and find a guy to show me around. Unfortunately, without prior announcement we cannot visit many places and also my time is short.

    But first we visit a nice tea plantation. Each professional plugger manages to harvest 50-250 kg of leaves per day which is a lot and will satisfy the Indian plantation owners but the worker gets just 71 UGX (0,02 EUR) per kg. Again, most of it is exported, all is non-organic industry and nobody knows why Indians import East African tea. They all produce only broken black tea. There is no such thing as "green tea in whole leaves" or "single origin tea" or any quality label at all. Somewhat boring.

    The coffee (Robusta) in turn is growing scattered between outer forest trees and banana plants and processed in organic ways. In order to keep the animals from leaving Kibale Forest and securing their crops the locals plant bands of coffee, tea, pepper and tobacco at the forest boundary. All these crops are not eaten by the wild things. Additionally, in order to keep elephants from raiding around they establish bee hives because somehow elephants don't like bees around their ears and return into the forest. This is mainly financed by the national park fees. Interesting! But the coffee marketing could be improved. Difficult to buy in the place, I don't know where all of it is going nor the locals seem to know. Also the coffee processing is inefficient. They do this home-roasting on fire but with that you cannot process large quantities after a harvest. Also the roasting is very inhomogeneous. I bought a pack of which more than half of the beans are coal - crushable to powder between my fingers - and the others are still light brown. This is not tasty. Grinding is another issue. There are no grinders around. The people totally freaked out when I showed them my Turkish-style hand grinder. They even did not have any clue how such a thing works. I see some potential ...
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