Papua New Guinea AAK Cooperative

64 communities from across the highlands region make up the AAK Cooperative. That’s 64 different ‘house-lines’, single-family villages each with languages and traditions uniquely their own. What they have in common is a pidgin called Tok Pisin, and membership in the AAK Cooperative. AAK stands for Apo, Angra and Kange – the word for ‘Unity’ in the three major local languages. Coffee brings the world together in more ways than one. AAK is the only cooperative in PNG to unify so many disparate tribes, and they are proud of the role that coffee plays in promoting unity.

With the exception of a few well-known estates, Papua New Guinea coffee is for the most part all from smallholder production, all very small scale and very little attention is paid to high specialty production due to the strong involvement of middlemen. While the middlemen play a valuable role in bringing the coffee economy to remote areas high up in the mountains, they add yet another factor working against quality promotion between buyer and seller. With so many disparate cultural groups and languages across the Highlands, PNG culture has traditionally also not lent itself well to cooperative export structures. AAK is one of the few organizations in the country to have successfully organized farmers across the Western, Central and Eastern Highlands into cohesive groups focused on quality.