The love and desire of Coffee is highly cherished in nearly all of the remotest parts of Papua New Guinea where coffee is grown as a cash crop. Coffee is harvested and delivered either to the village or where small coffee plot owners dwell. The freshly harvested cherries are manually pulped. It is an activity the whole family carry out. The people form either a circle or a rectangle around the cherry mount and they pulp as many cherries as they can. One such place is a village in Obura-Wanenare electorate in Eastern Highlands Province as shown in the image.
This is not unique to Obura-Wanenare only. Kumukio in Sialum local level government, Morobe Province also faces the similar scenario. A portable drum pulper costs approximately PGK800.00 (US$320.00). This vital piece of equipment is unaffordable to this people. Manual and machine pulping do the same quality of work. However, in terms of rate which is measured as mass per unit of time indicates manual pulping as the slowest (at the snail speed). The average is 5 kilograms per hour whereas machine pulping does 60 kilograms in one hour. Machine is highly recommended because it is twelve time efficient. The political leadership of Papua New Guinea should realize that coffee is one cash crop that helps the remote people’s cash economy. Hence, more funds and resources should be concentrated on this vital cash crop in terms of purchasing portable coffee machines.
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