Borneo’s scorching midday sun bakes the mud under my shoes as I follow a group of excited Malaysian farmers towards the fields that, they believe, could help develop tourism in a remote part of Sarawak.
“Here we are.” Bespectacled farmer Tomy Pangot adjusts his straw hat before pointing at a clearing where rows of plants sway in the breeze.
With barely concealed pride, Pangot chaperones us around the neat rows of his liberica coffee plants.
Plump, red cherries cause the branches to bend slightly under their weight – a cargo of hope for Pangot and the people of Long Banga, an outpost in the southern reaches of Ulu Baram, a region in the northeast of Sarawak on the island of Borneo.
“Back in the day, it took us four days on foot to reach school in Bario,” the penghulu (regional head) of Punang Kelapang, Robin Udau, told me, as we shared the welcome dinner offered by another elder for our arrival.
These days, the rugged logging road between the two towns takes about three hours, while the journey from Long Banga to the coast and Miri, the area’s biggest city, is a bumpy four-wheel-drive adventure that can take up to 10 hours.
The push to make Malaysian liberica coffee its signature product is helping Long Banga attract adventurous travellers to its charming homestays and mix of Sa’ban and Kenyah Lepo Keh culture.
Liberica’s almond-shaped beans have a slightly smoky flavour and a floral and fruity aroma, but account for only 1 per cent of global coffee production.
Less well known than arabica and robusta, liberica plants can grow below 800 metres (2,600ft) altitude and adapt well to the tropical lowlands of Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, where farmers have experimented with this variety for half a century.
Coffee was introduced to Borneo in the late 19th century by the “Second White Rajah”, British head of state in Sarawak Charles Brooke. Assisted by Italian botanist Odoardo Beccari, in 1866 Brooke ordered 600 acres (240 hectares) of land near the present-day state capital, Kuching, cleared to start the Matang Coffee and Tea Plantation, the first in Malaysia.
The operation closed down in 1912 because of mismanagement and it was to take more than a century for Malaysian beans to catch the coffee industry’s attention again.
In October 2021, beans from My Liberica, a grower based in Johor in peninsular Malaysia, took third place at the World Barista Championship in Italy.
“It’s important to be realistic,” says Alasdair Clayre, a British anthropologist raised in Long Banga in the 1960s by missionary parents who is studying the politics of identity of the Sa’ban ethnic group.
Treated like a community member, Clayre is helping the Sa’ban to think of new ways to use their farmland and surrounding natural bounty to change their lives for the better.
Farmers such as Ludia Apoi, who runs the Billeng Lemdin Homestay with her husband, Ujai, in a cosy wooden and concrete house opposite the runway of Long Banga’s tiny airport, see the introduction of liberica coffee plants as a first step to overcoming the land’s challenging geography.
Coffee, Clayre believes, can be a game changer because, unlike the area’s sweet-as-sugar pineapples and other crops, it’s light to handle and transport, can be stored for a year or more and won’t perish on the long journey to the markets on the coast.
“I am aware that coffee projects have failed elsewhere in Sarawak, but my aim here is to have a handful of successful people, a spearhead group, to make it all work,” says Clayre as we walk between the coffee plants, inspecting their cherries and leaves.
Unlike arabica and robusta, which generally have a beans-to-cherries yield ratio of 20 per cent (coffee beans are the seeds of the plant’s cherries), Clayre says liberica’s yield ratio is only 7 per cent.
“Since liberica’s ratio is so low, it’s important to calculate how many plants are needed to give the farmers a chance to grow a profitable economy,” says Dr Kenny Lee Wee Ting, co-founder of Earthlings Coffee, which operates two shops in Kuching.
This globe-trotting specialist was among the organisers of the first Borneo Coffee Symposium, held in Kuching in 2019, when experts from around the world gathered to discuss how to improve production in Sarawak.
The symposium’s success inspired Sarawak deputy chief minister Douglas Uggah Embas to propose the state become a major regional producer of liberica coffee beans.
Soon after that, the Department of Agriculture Sarawak donated between 500 and 1,000 coffee seedlings each to entrepreneurial farmer families in Long Banga and other villages.
Lee, who has offered to consult for several of them, has taken a keen interest in Long Banga, which has some of the most fertile land in Sarawak. He has already funded the greenhouses that the village farmers needed to better dry and stock their beans and wishes to educate them on the tastes of liberica’s picky international buyers.
“I am trying to come up with a plan I call the ‘liberica refinement project’,” says Lee, who doesn’t believe farmers can make a sustainable profit from selling liberica beans only in the Malaysian market.
“I will buy 2,000kg to 3,000kg (4,400lbs to 6,600lbs) of liberica [beans] per year directly from the Long Banga farmers, teaching them how to process [them] properly.
“In this way, they’ll be able to sell them at a higher price, and they’ll be free to do so anywhere in the world, not just to Earthlings,” he says, referring to his own brand.
Long Banga and its surroundings have much to offer visitors besides coffee. Beyond a charming and semi-abandoned wooden Kenyah longhouse, a vestige of Borneo’s past communal lifestyle, treks can be made to a waterfall and a cluster of enigmatic rocks that archaeologists believe are ancient burial sites.
I spend a morning hiking through dense forest and farmland to Long Lamai, the most important settlement in the area of the Penan – the last ethnic group in Borneo to abandon their nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle – and then loop back to Long Banga on a chartered long-tail boat along the rushing Balong river.
In the Kelabit settlement of Long Peluan (the ancestral village of the Kuala Lumpur-based sape songstress Alena Murang) we arrange another long-tail boat trip down the Baleh river to the Kelapang, the local name for the Baram river.
The cascading rapids of Um Wang – about 10km (6 miles) to the east of Long Banga – block our passage further downstream, so we moor on the rocky shore and scramble over stones and down jungle paths alongside the river to a vantage point from where the falls, swollen by recent rains, look like a whirring gash in the flow.
There’s certainly enthusiasm for the development of tourism alongside that of coffee in Long Banga, says Clayre, as we observe the violent thrashing of the water against the rocks, “but it’d be best to learn more by making our own mistakes before others can join us and put the best techniques into practice”.