India’s latest coffee hub? Beans and brews offer new hope to Nagaland

Juro Coffee House in Dimapur, Mokokchung, Wokha, Chumoukedima, and Kohima, India — With its high ceilings, soft lighting, and brown and turquoise blue cushioned chairs, it appears to be a chic European cafe.

Sitting right off India’s National Highway-2, which connects the northeastern states of Assam, Nagaland and Manipur, the cafe hosts a live roastery unit that was set up in January by the Nagaland state government. Green coffee beans from 12 Nagaland districts are ground, roasted, and served from farm to table.

On a typical day, the cafe gets about a hundred customers, sipping on coffee, with smoke breaks in between.

Although those figures aren’t particularly large, they are nonetheless startling.

For decades, an armed rebellion seeking the secession of Nagaland from India dominated the state’s political and economic landscape. Since India’s independence, Naga separatists have been staging a plebiscite in which nearly all votes have been cast in favor of separating from the Indian union, killing thousands of people. India has never accepted that vote.

Agriculture has been the mainstay of the state’s economy, with paddy, bananas and oranges, and green leafy vegetables like mustard leaves being the main traditional crops grown.

Now, a growing band of cafes, roasteries and farms across the state are looking to give Nagaland a new identity by promoting locally grown Arabica and Robusta coffee. One of them is Starbucks.

While coffee was first introduced to the state in 1981 by the Coffee Board of India, a body set up by the Indian government to promote coffee production, it only began to take off after 2014.

Nagaland currently has almost 250 coffee farms spread over 10, 700 hectares (26, 400 acres) of land in 11 districts, thanks to government policy changes and the support of a group of young entrepreneurs. About 9, 500 farmers are engaged in coffee cultivation, according to the state government. In addition to homegrown cafes popping up in major cities like Dimapur and Kohima and in inner-districts like Mokokchung and Mon, the small state that borders Myanmar currently has eight roasteries.

For Searon Yanthan, the founder of Juro Coffee House, the journey began with COVID-19, when the pandemic forced Naga youth studying or working in other parts of India or abroad to return home. According to Yanthan, this turned out to be a disguised blessing because they restored the state’s value. “My father used to say, those were the days when we used to export people”, he told Al Jazeera. “No longer is it time to export our ideas and products,” he said.

“Back to the farm,”

Like many kids his age, Yanthan left Nagaland for higher studies in 2010, first landing up in the southern city of Chennai for high school and then the northern state of Punjab for his undergraduate studies, before dropping out to study in Bangalore. The 30-year-old founder, who donned a pair of chic formal cotton pants and a baby pink polo neck shirt, said, “I studied commerce, but the only subject I was good at was entrepreneurship.”

The pandemic hit just as he was about to graduate, and Yanthan left with no degree in hand. He hid into a government vehicle from Dimapur during the COVID-19 lockdown to return to his family’s farm estate, 112 kilometers (70 miles) from the state capital Kohima, where his father first started growing coffee in 2015.

He ended up spending seven months at the farm during lockdown and realised that coffee farmers didn’t know much about the quality of beans, which wasn’t surprising considering coffee is not a household beverage among Nagas and other ethnic communities in India’s northeast.

In 2021, Yanthan, the founder of Lithanro Coffee, the parent company of Juro, began conducting research on improving the quality of coffee and maintaining plantations. Once his own processing unit was set up, he began hosting other coffee farmers, offering them a manually brewed cup of their own produce.

Gradually, he built a relationship with 200 farmers from whom he sources beans today, besides the coffee grown on his farm.

In a state where private-sector employment has historically been elusive, Yanthan sees coffee as an opportunity for Naga’s youth to dream of economic prospects beyond government jobs. “Every village you go to, parents are working day and night in the farms to make his son or daughter get a government job”, Yanthan told Al Jazeera.

According to him, coffee could also be used as a means of bringing people together. “In this industry, it’s not only one person who can do this work, it has to be a community”, he said.

brewery success

So what changed in 2015? The state government’s decision to transfer responsibility for coffee development to Nagaland’s Land Resources Department (LRD) that year is widely praised by coffee buyers and roasters. The state department implements schemes sponsored by the federal government and the state government, including those promoting coffee.

Unlike in the past, when Nagaland, a region with poor physical connectivity with the rest of India, had no internet, coffee roasters, buyers, and farmers could now establish online relationships with other people. “]The] market was not like what it is today”, said Albert Ngullie, the director of the LRD.

In addition to funding farm maintenance, the LRD funds the construction of nurseries and provides free saplings to farmers. Unlike before, the government is also investing in the post-harvest process by supplying coffee pulpers to farmers, setting up washing stations and curing units in a few districts and recently, supporting entrepreneurs with roastery units.

Lichan Humtsoe is one of those who stand to gain. He set up his company Ete (which means “ours” in the Lotha Naga dialect) in 2016 after quitting his pen-pushing job in the LRD and was the first in the state to source, serve and supply Naga specialty coffee. Ete currently operates its own cafes, roasteries, and coffee lab, where it examines the chemical composition of local fruits in terms of flavor notes. Ete also has a coffee school in Nagaland (and a campus in the neighbouring state of Manipur) with a dedicated curriculum and training facilities to foster the next generation of coffee professionals.

Humtsoe claimed that Nagaland’s government and the private sector have worked together to promote coffee over the past ten years.

Nagaland’s growing coffee story also coincides with an overall increase in India’s exports of coffee beans.

India exported coffee for the first time in 2024, surpassing $1 billion in production, doubling from 2020 to 2021. While more than 70 percent of India’s coffee comes from the southern state of Karnataka, the Coffee Board has been trying to expand cultivation in the Northeast.

Given that Nagaland has relied almost entirely on federal funding for decades of unrest, creating a coffee culture there is no easy task. Growing up in the 1990s, when military operations against alleged armed groups were frequent and security forces would often barge into homes, day or night, Humtsoe wanted nothing to do with India.

He eventually stopped speaking Nagamese, a bridge dialect between the state’s 16 tribes and an Assamese creole. But he grew disillusioned with the political solution rooted in separatism that armed groups were seeking. The now 39-year-old was struck by the irony of the state’s dependence on New Delhi’s funds.

Coffee became his own path to self-determination.

“From 2016 onward, I was more of the question, “How can I inspire India?”

The difficulty of quality

Ngullie of the LRD insists that the coffee revolution brewing in Nagaland is also helping the state preserve its forests.

He continued, “We don’t do land clearing,” implying in essence that coffee was assisting the state’s agriculture in moving away from the state’s traditional slash-and-burn practices to agroforestry.

The LRD buys seed varieties from the Coffee Board for farmers, and growers make more money than before.

A 40-year-old farmer named Limakumzak Walling recalled how his late father was one of the first to cultivate Arabica coffee on their ancestral property in Khar village in the Mokokchung district in 1981. “During my father’s time, they used to cultivate it, but people didn’t find the market”, he said. It was a “burden” rather than a “bonus”

Before the Nagaland government took charge of coffee development, the Coffee Board would buy produce from farmers and sell it to buyers or auction it in their headquarters in Bengaluru, Karnataka. However, according to Walling, the payments would be made in quarterly payments, sometimes even more. Since he took over the farm, and the state department became the nodal agency, payments are not only higher but paid upfront with buyers directly procuring from the farmers.

Profits aren’t that bad, though. Walling makes less than 200, 000 rupees per annum (roughly $2, 300) and like most farmers, is still engaged in jhum cultivation, the traditional slash-and-burn method of farming practised by Indigenous tribes in northeastern hills. In recent years, erratic weather patterns and declining soil fertility have contributed to increased land use in jhum cultivation, which has been linked to further environmental degradation and greenhouse gas emissions, which have both contributed to climate change.

“Trees are drying up and so is the mountain spring water”, Walling told Al Jazeera, pointing at the evergreen woods where spring leaves were already wilting in March, well before the formal arrival of summer. Because we fear spoiling our land, he continued, “Infestation is a major issue, and we don’t use even organic fertilisers.”

And though the state government has set up some washing stations and curing units, many more are needed for these facilities to be accessible to all farmers, said Walling, for them to sustain coffee as a viable crop and secure better prices. We are still unsure of the quality. We just harvest it”, he said.

The Coffee Board of India operations in Nagaland are led by liaison officer Dipanjali Kemprai, who told Al Jazeera that the organization encourages farmers to supplement their income by growing coffee alongside horticultural crops like black pepper. “But intercropping still hasn’t fully taken off”, said Kemprai.

Despite the state’s efforts to promote sustainable agriculture, recent satellite data suggests that shifting cultivation, or jhum, may be rising once more.

The coffee industry’s future

Though it is the seventh-largest producer of coffee, India is far behind export-heavy countries like Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia and Italy.

Entrepreneurs tell a different story than the Nagaland government, who maintains that exports have been steadily increasing. Vivito Yeptho, who co-owns Nagaland Coffee and became the state’s first certified barista in 2018, said that their last export of 15 metric tonnes (MT) was in 2019, to South Africa.

There are still some accomplishments to be proud of.

In 2024, the state registered its highest-ever production at 48 MT, per state department officials. Of the 40 cafes in India, 12 are in the Northeast, according to Yogho, Nagaland Coffee alone provides them. And Naga coffee is already making waves internationally, winning silver at the Aurora International Taste Challenge in South Africa in 2022 and then gold in 2023.

We must produce at least 80-100 MT annually, according to Yeptho, according to Al Jazeera.

But before aiming for mass production, entrepreneurs said they still have a long way to go in improving the quality of beans and their post-harvest processing.

Yanthan’s Lithanro brand is the only state-to-cup institution with a washing machine and a curing room on his farm, where he grows both Arabica and Robusta varieties. He believes farmers need to focus on better maintenance of their plantations, to begin with.

According to Yanthan, “the attitude is that the plants don’t need to be cared for during the summers and the monsoon season (which starts in November)”. “But the trees need to be constantly pruned to keep them within a certain height, weeding has to be done and the stems need to be maintained as well”.

Their dreams are exploding despite these obstacles that have actually ground Naga farmers and business owners.

Humtsoe hopes for speciality coffee from Nagaland to soon be GI tagged, like varieties from Coorg, Chikmagalur, Araku Valley and Wayanad in southern India.

He stated that he wants Nagas to be associated with good Indian coffee, not just Nagaland.

Source: Aljazeera