Brazil’s Jacu bird poo-poos US tariffs as specialty coffee sector suffers

Reuters :

Brazil’s coffee sector is going through a stinky time amid punitive US tariffs but a specialty coffee that passes through the digestive tract of the exotic Jacu bird is emerging from the muck-flinging without undue distress.

US President Donald Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff on Brazilian goods in early August, amid a spat with Brazil’s leftist leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. It was a powerful blow to Brazil’s premium coffee brands, which had Americans as their most avid consumers.

But as Brazil’s premium coffee exports began to fall sharply, one peculiar brew defied the downturn by appealing to Japanese, British and, increasingly, Brazilian consumers, hinting that the country’s specialty coffee future may depend on reaching beyond its biggest traditional market.

Americans, on the other hand, don’t have much of a taste for Jacu bird coffee, a high-end Arabica that’s eaten, digested, and defecated by a fowl native to Brazil’s Atlantic Forest before being turned into a brew.

“Americans … don’t have the same vision as the Japanese, the Asians, people from Saudi Arabia, the Europeans, of looking for this type of quality,” Henrique Sloper, the producer of Jacu Bird coffee, told reporters. “So, for us, it doesn’t affect anything in the specific case of this product.”

Jacu Bird coffee is prized for its floral aroma and balanced acidity, qualities that stem from the beans’ absorbent nature and the bird’s digestive process, according to Rogerio Lemke, agriculture supervisor at Fazenda Camocim, the farm behind its production.

“The Jacu doesn’t just eat coffee, it eats fruit too, and inside its craw, the coffee bean absorbs the characteristics of these fruits into the bean as well,” Lemke said as he stood before drying Jacu poop, filled with coffee beans.

The Jacus that roam the coffee groves of Fazenda Camocim are a species of Penelope, large fruit-eating birds found across Latin America.

The farm got the idea to enlist their help after watching them peck at ripe coffee cherries and recalling Indonesia’s famous Kopi Luwak coffee, made from beans that pass through the digestive system of civets.

Yet, while Jacu Bird coffee, which can go for up to £960 (around $1,300) a kilo, has not seen sales affected, the same cannot be said for the rest of Brazil’s specialty coffee sector.

August exports of specialty coffee from Brazil, the world’s top coffee producer, to the United States, the world’s largest consumer of the beverage, were down almost 70 percent versus July, according to the Brazilian Specialty Coffee Association.

While the association has not yet published any export figures for September, the situation for Brazil’s specialty coffee remains ruinous, Marcio Ferreira, the president of Brazil’s coffee exporters group, Cecafe, told Reuters earlier this month.

“The biggest drop in Brazilian coffee imports was in specialty coffees,” Ferreira said, citing the impact of tariffs on specialty beans’ premium cost.

So while Jacu Bird coffee’s geographical spread means it has dodged Trump’s tariffs, the charges represent a challenging moment for Fazenda Camocim’s other coffees, which make up the majority of its annual production, added Sloper, the farm’s chief executive.

“America is the largest coffee market on the planet (and) we’re not entering America,” Sloper said. “In the short term, it’s very bad, but in the medium and long term it might force us to open other markets,” he said.