My trip around Ywangan: 90 Danu villages growing outstanding Arabica coffee.

A vital part of Indochina is spending time with our producing partners at origin. Many of them are family-run businesses, just like we are, so having regular contact and fostering a strong relationship between our families is important to us.

We had a long trip planned for this year which included China, Myanmar, the Philippines and also potential new farms in India and Thailand. Like many others, our plans had to change due to the Covid19 pandemic, but we were lucky enough to get to visit some coffee farms at the beginning of the harvest. Christian spent time in Yunnan, China in December 2019 whilst I visited Myanmar in January 2020. 

I spent most of my days in Ywangan, a township with an elevation of 1098 – 1534 masl in Shan State, in the middle east of Myanmar. This is where the majority of our Myanmar specialty coffee comes from.

Ywangan Township along with Pindaya township constitute the Danu Self-Administered Zone. As stipulated by the 2008 Constitution of Myanmar, it’s self-administered by the people who belong to the Danu ethnic group. 

Out of 125 villages in Ywangan Township, about 90 are engaged in coffee plantation, with 7,300 acres of coffee farms. Farmers here typically own a quarter of an acre to three acres, on which they intercrop a few varieties of Arabica coffee with crops such as avocado, jackfruit, jengkol beans, papaya, pineapple, passion fruits, banana, tea leaf or shady macadamia trees.

But it wasn’t always like that. Ywangan began growing coffee in the early 1980s as a substitute crop for poppy. The vast majority of these farmers exist on a subsistence basis, with coffee and the crops mentioned above sustaining their families. 

Having visited many individual smallholder farms, it was striking to see how well the coffee grows with very little maintenance in terms of pruning and feeding. The farmers in this region do not use any kind of chemical defensive sprays, neither chemical fertiliser. Still, there is no evidence of disease, and this was visible in the cherries. The only product that wealthier farmers add to the soil is fertiliser from animal origin (mainly cattle and chicken manure). 

Ywangan shares many challenges with other coffee-producing regions around the world: market prices, climate issues or low-income social background are just some of them.

The farmers I’ve met shared with me their environmental concerns. Last year they had a heavy hail rain with dire consequences for the productivity in the current season. Ywangan is also in Myanmar’s ‘dry zone’ with increasing temperatures and droughts becoming more frequent. The lack of freshwater during the dry season also means that farmers have to store water during the rainy season for use in the summer. 

In recent years, coffee has helped to develop the region, especially with the emergence of Myanmar in the international specialty coffee market. Nowadays, farmers have access to more fair market prices, inside the country and overseas, for their cherries or their green beans. 

This admirable development is partly thanks to the collective initiatives that have flourished not only in Ywangan but also in other regions of Shan State, with new actors continuing to emerge in the local coffee market. These projects include some of our partners, such as Mandalay Coffee Group, Shwe Taung Thu and The Lady Specialty Coffee and Amayar. We feel incredibly proud to call them our partners and are thrilled to keep on working hand in hand for a sustainable and ethical future for coffee.