The disturbing secret behind the world’s most expensive coffee

Kopi luwak is made from coffee beans plucked from civets’ feces. This is bad news for civets

It’s the world’s most expensive coffee, and it’s made from poop. Or rather, it’s made from coffee beans that are partially digested and then pooped out by the civet, a catlike creature. A cup of kopi luwak, as it’s known, can sell for as much as $80 in the United States.

Found in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the civet has a long tail like a monkey, face markings like a raccoon, and stripes or spots on its body. It plays an important role in the food chain, eating insects and small reptiles in addition to fruits like coffee cherries and mangoes, and being eaten in turn by leopards, large snakes, and crocodiles.

Captive civets are sometimes fed only coffee cherries, the fruit that produces coffee beans. In the wild, their diet includes fruit, insects, and reptiles. 

At first the civet coffee trade boded well for these creatures. In Indonesia, the Asian palm civet, which raids commercial fruit farms, is often seen as a pest, so the growth in the kopi luwak industry encouraged local people to protect civets for their valuable dung. Their digestive enzymes change the structure of proteins in the coffee beans, which removes some of the acidity to make a smoother cup of coffee.

But as civet coffee has gained popularity, and with Indonesia growing as a tourist destination where visitors want to see and interact with wildlife, more wild civets are being confined to cages on coffee plantations. In part, this is for coffee production, but it’s also so money can be made from civet-ogling tourists.

Researchers from Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit and the London-based nonprofit World Animal Protection assessed the living conditions of nearly 50 wild civets held in cages at 16 plantations on Bali. The results, published Thursday in the journal Animal Welfare, paint a grim picture.

Civet dung, studded with partially digested coffee beans, used to be collected from the wild. Increasingly, civets are instead kept in cramped, unsanitary cages on coffee plantations

From the size and sanitation of the cages to the ability of their occupants to act like normal civets, every plantation the researchers visited failed basic animal welfare requirements. “Some of these cages were literally the tiniest—we would call them rabbit hutches. They’re absolutely soaked through with urine and droppings all over the place,” said Neil D’Cruze, one of the researchers.

Some of the civets were very thin, from being fed a restricted diet of only coffee cherries—the fruit that surrounds the coffee bean. Some were obese, from never being able to move around freely. And some were jacked up on caffeine, D’Cruze said.

But what he found most disturbing was the wire floor many of the animals were forced to stand, sit, and sleep on around the clock. “If you’re standing on that kind of wire mesh all the time, it’s going to cause sores and abrasions. They have nowhere to go to get off that flooring,” D’Cruze said. “It’s a constant, intense source of pain and discomfort.”

Additionally, many of the civets had no access to clean water and no opportunity to interact with other civets. And they were exposed to daytime noise from traffic and tourists, which is particularly disturbing for these nocturnal animals.

A captive civet, likely taken from the wild, looks out from a wire cage where it is kept to produce kopi luwak, the world’s most expensive coffee. 

Wild or Caged: Who Knows?
All of this for a luxury item—and a second-rate one, at that. Part of what makes kopi luwak so special, experts say, is that wild civets pick and choose the choicest coffee cherries to eat. Keeping civets in cages and feeding them any old cherries leads to an inferior product.

Besides, says one coffee expert quoted in an article for the Specialty Coffee Association of America, the trade organization for gourmet coffee roasters and baristas, kopi luwak just isn’t that good to begin with. Although the civets’ digestive process does make the coffee smoother, it also removes the good acids and flavor that characterize a specialty cup of coffee.

There’s now no way to tell whether a bag of kopi luwak was made from wild or caged civets. A BBC undercover investigation revealed in 2013 how coffee from caged civets in inhumane conditions ends up labeled as wild civet coffee in Europe.

Even Tony Wild, the coffee trader who introduced kopi luwak to the West, warns against it in an article for the Guardian. It has become increasingly industrialized, abusive, and faked, he said.

No certification scheme exists to ensure that coffee labeled “wild” is actually that. And other coffee certifiers working to ensure environmentally responsible farming and production refuse to certify any kopi luwak whatsoever.

The Sustainable Agriculture Network standards, or SAN, which the New York-based Rainforest Alliance and other well-known coffee certifiers use to issue their stamps of approval, forbid the hunting and capture of wild animals on farms. The prohibition of caged civets is specifically singled out in the SAN guidelines for coffee in Indonesia.

UTZ, another major sustainable coffee certification standard, also forbids caged wildlife on farms and will not certify any kopi luwak.

Alex Morgan at the Rainforest Alliance, which uses SAN standards, says it’s too risky to certify kopi luwak. It’s just too hard to establish whether the beans are 100 percent wild-sourced or not.

“My personal advice is generally to avoid it,” he said. “More likely than not it’s going to be coming from a caged production landscape.”

(Source: National Geographic)

Faith versus conservation: Tirupati temple, forest department fight over the Indian civet

Fridays are considered auspicious at the Tirupati Tirumala temple in Andhra Pradesh. Every week on this day, temple priests anoint the idol of Lord Venkateshwara, an incarnation of Vishnu, with a perfumed substance during prayers. This sacred offering is called punugu, made from the aromatic secretion of the small Indian civet, a nocturnal mammal.

The civet secretes a wax-like substance with a strong smell from the perineal gland located near its tail. This is then diluted with gingelly oil, which gives it a musky fragrance, to make the offering for the weekly ritual. But the practice has led to an almost-decade-long row between temple authorities and the forest department, which came back to life this month.

Till 2008, the temple bred civets at its dairy farm in Tirupati. The waxy secretion was collected from wooden planks where the animals habitually rubbed themselves. But that year, the Andhra Pradesh forest department seized the animals from the farm as the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 prevents their domestication. Since then, the department and the temple have been at loggerheads over the management and care of the animals, which are currently housed at the Sri Venkateswara Zoological Park in the city. In 2013, the forest officials filed a criminal case against the temple authorities for keeping the animals in captivity. But four years later, in the first week of March, a court dismissed the case.

The dispute is far from over, though, and proposals for a solution are in limbo.

Long-standing dispute
Civets rarely breed in close captivity. This realisation drove the temple authorities in 2006 to propose a different arrangement for the animals: they offered to fund a nocturnal house for them at the Sri Venkateswara zoo. However, they insisted that their own staff be allowed to look after the animals to ensure the required amount of secretion was procured for the weekly ritual.

The forest department rejected the proposal, saying extraction and exchange of civet oil was a violation of the Wildlife Protection Act.

Today, the temple authorities are still willing to fund the nocturnal house at the zoo, provided forest officials assure them that they can avail of the secretion in the quantity they require.

At present, they depend on zoo officials to extract the secretion and give it to them, according to Dr Srikanth Babu, director of Animal Care Land, a non-governmental organisation based in Tirupati.

However, while the forest authorities are in favour of the temple-funded house for the animals, they are against facilitating any supply of the civet secretion to the temple. “We are only protectors and keepers of the wild animals and we cannot do any extractions or trading,” PV Chalapathi Rao, chief conservator of forests, told Firstpost.

The ritual aspect to this long-standing tussle makes this a sensitive case, said Srikanth Babu. “Since this is an offering for God, there is a lot of sentiment attached to this custom by locals,” he added. “It is better to provide a natural environment to the civet while providing punugu to the temple, so that both are satisfied.”

Ancient practice
The use of civet secretion in India is not restricted to temple rituals. It is an expensive ingredient that is also used in ayurvedic medicine, said Francis Xavier, a member of the Species Survival Commission of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

In this study by James McHugh, professor of religion at the University of South Carolina, the secretion finds mention in medical and pharmacological literature of the 9th or 10th centuries. It is also found in early Sanskrit texts and in the accounts of foreign travelers.

“The earliest foreign reference to civet in India is apparently given by Friar Jordanus in the early fourteenth century, who reported a cat with highly odoriferous sweat, which was collected from a ‘certain wood’ on which the animal rubbed itself. This would seem to establish that the method still used at Tirupati is very old, and it also appears to be distinctively Indian.”

— James McHugh, The Disputed Civets and the Complexion of the God: Secretions and History in India

The Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 has not only come in the way of the Tirupati Tirumala temple’s rituals, it has also affected traditional healers in villages across South India. Many of these medical practitioners have lost their livelihoods as they can no longer keep the civet as a domestic animal or use its secretion.

Xavier, who spent five years researching small mammals in South Indian forests, said the practice of collecting the civet’s secretion has been ritualised in villages. “There is a special cage made for civets with proper dimensions,” he said. “This animal has a curious habit of walking to and fro continuously, and this cage gives enough space for the animal to roam. A small bamboo reed is kept in the centre and the civet will rub itself on the reed while prowling.”

Xavier observed that the civet uses its secretion to mark its territory and to attract potential mates. “Each civet has its own unique smell, like a human fingerprint,” Xavier said. “This secretion contains a unique property called civetone, which is chemically very similar to musk [collected from the musk deer]. It is because of this fragrance that civetone is collected to make perfumes.”

It is now easy to produce civetone synthetically, since its chemical structure is known. But the real deal remains in demand. “Actual civet secretion is a very costly product,” he added. “It is said that one gram of civet extraction is equivalent to one gram of gold. It has that much value.”

(Source: Scroll)