On April 10, farmers at the Limu Mountain in south China's island province of Hainan were bringing in their freshly picked coffee fruits to a coffee plant located in the middle of the island. It is the final stage of harvesting coffee fruits in Hainan.

Lying on the "coffee bean belt" – a tropical geographical region near the equator where land usually receives abundant rainfall and ample sunlight – with natural volcanic soil, Hainan is ideal for coffee plantations, but does not have much land.

Due to the fragmentation of land, Hainan's scale of coffee plantations do not match southwest China's Yunnan Province where Starbucks, Nestbird, Peet's and many major international coffee brands root their coffee business.

However, coffee drinking is deeply ingrained in Hainan culture. Along with the growing demand from China's expanding middle class, local coffee growers are working harder to develop the region's coffee business in a bid to carve a larger piece of the pie from the lucrative home consumption and export markets.

Historical coffee plantation region

While Hainan is known to most people as a tropical paradise for tourism, it is in fact, home to China's earliest coffee plantation outside Yunnan Province in southwest China.

Hainan has a long history of coffee cultivation. The first coffee seed was brought back by overseas Chinese returning from Southeast Asia, back in the 1890s, according to Hainan Daily, however only 12 trees survived.

Later on, overseas Chinese returning from the Southeast Asia continued to scale up the plantation and expand the coffee culture throughout the island. The first coffee plant, Sun River Coffee, was established in 1953 in Xinglong region on the south of the island. And local farmers began to cultivate their own breed, "Dafeng-1," from 1956 in the middle of the island, according to the Agricultural reclamation records of Hainan Province.

Even then Chinese premier Zhou Enlai praised Xinglong coffee as the best he'd ever tried after visiting Xinglong and tasting the local brew in 1960, according to the Hainan Daily report.

Growing awareness of Hainan coffee

Different from the other major small-sized coffee beans – Arabica – that's been widely grown along the "coffee bean belt," the type grown in Hainan is a medium-sized fruit, Robusta.

Both Arabica and Robusta are two major coffee species globally traded .

Arabica coffee beans typically have a sweeter, softer taste, with tones of sugar, fruit, and berries. It has higher acidity levels, which give it a bright, tangy flavor, and a subtle chocolate or caramel-like aftertaste.

Robusta coffee beans are, on the other hand, often used in the production of instant coffee due to their higher bitterness levels, rougher taste, higher caffeine content and lower cost. They have about twice the amount of caffeine as Arabica beans.

Robusta coffee production is slightly lower than that of Arabica. But as the demand and consumption for coffee production rose over the past decades, it has gradually increased to account for up to 45 percent of the world coffee production, according to a report by Orient Securities.

More importantly, Robusta coffee trees are able to withstand higher temperatures, which allows them to grow at lower altitudes.

However, local farmers in Hainan didn't have much incentive to grow coffee due to the limitation of land, and yield variation. Yet, local crop scientists worked in the field for years to cultivate a type that could adapt to Hainan's condition.

"We've been planting coffee trees in Hainan for 67 years," said Li Yu, Party secretary and chairman of Hainan State Farms Tropical Products Industry Group (Haiken Group).

Haiken Group’s coffee tree breed "Dafeng-1" has achieved an average yield of 1,000 kilograms per mu, or about 15 tonnes per hectare. They applied years of grafting and special protection of the scions to ensure a high yield of fruits that are not heavy enough to break the branches.

Haiken Group currently owns 4,461 mu (297.4 hectare) of this type of coffee tree plantation in the Limu mountain area, and the plantation also promoted nearby farmers to switch around 1,000 mu to coffee plantations, Li said.

According to Li, the purchase price for coffee fruit is 4.2 yuan per Jin ( one Jin is approximately half a kilo), and the output value per mu is about 8500 yuan. That is about $18,510 per hectare.

"Therefore, cultivating coffee has become a significant source of economic income for farmers here," Li said.

But to sell Hainan's Robusta coffee bean to the world, that is still not enough.

Free Trade Port as a solution: 'Global purchase and sales'  

China announced a plan to turn Hainan into a free trade pilot zone (FTP) and a free trade port in April, 2018. Over the past five years, preferential policies such as zero tariffs and low tax rates have prompted more enterprises to expand their business here.

As the area celebrates the fifth anniversary of the establishment of the free trade port, many international brands came to the ongoing China International Consumer Products Expo (CICPE) and decided to expand their businesses in China from there. 

"We want to see whether it is possible to expand our presence in China in coffee with the cooperation of Hainan companies," Robin Setyono, CEO of Indonesian coffee behemoth Kapal Api Global, told CGTN when he was visiting the Haiken Group.

"We believe that the Chinese market has a lot of potential and Hainan, with its coffee culture, is a very good place to start expanding in China," he said.

Charoen Pokphand Group (CP Group), a multinational corporation with a regional office in Beijing, has eyed Hainan's FTP policies for coffee business. It established a tourism site based on coffee production plant in Xinglong after acquiring the Sun River Coffee plant in 2020, bringing new momentum to a historically-famous brand.

"We are open to acquiring coffee fruits from the surrounding farmers," Zhao Jinlong, the general manager of CP Group's Hainan Xinglong Coffee Industry Development, in an interview with CGTN.

With CP Group's international logistics advantage adding on to Hainan's free trade port policies, the company aims to carry out "global purchase and sales" of Hainan coffee, he added.

Apart from coffee bean trading, Hainan is also promoting its domestically developed breed "Dafeng-1" to neighboring countries through the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).

"In this way, we can utilize their lower-priced land resources to better explore the planting value of our coffee," Li added.

Video filmed and edited by: Zhao Chenchen

Chief Editor: Wu Gang

Supervisor: Liu Yuqi