How USAID is helping Indonesia’s vanilla farmers to grow export trade

Assistance from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is enabling small-scale spice farmers in Indonesia to create sustainable futures for themselves, ending long-standing reliance on aid.

In collaboration with international procurement, processing, and export company, Cooperative Business International (CBI), supportive partnerships have been established with international vendors such as Maryland, USA-based McCormick & Company, and more than 5,000 Indonesian spice farmers growing highly sought after produce such as pepper, cloves, nutmeg, and vanilla.

The partnerships provide enormous scope for farmers to rehabilitate abandoned plantations, establish new ones, and improve yields, at the same time ensuring a resilient and sustainable supply chain for the global market.

In the mountainous highlands of Papua the individually tailored international deals are providing new hope for many vanilla bean farmers — the world’s second most expensive spice after saffron — attempting to bounce back after years of labouring under burdens of food security and unfair trade arrangements.

Agustinus Daka is one such farmer benefiting from the new arrangements. Now aged 61 he leads a small group of farmers growing vanilla bean in a small community in the remote Indonesia province, which despite being Indonesia’s most resource-rich, has the archipelago’s highest rate of poverty. Such inequality only helping sustain an active secessionist movement who identify as Melanesian, not Indonesian, angry at the vast majority of resource revenue being diverted to Jakarta.