The story
PNG Coffee Festival in Goroka
The PNG Coffee Festival is held in Goroka, capital of Eastern Highlands Province, a region that alongside Western Highlands and Simbu produces most of the country's coffee, grown mainly by smallholder farmers in small garden plots rather than large plantations, and the festival showcases that crop alongside highlands cultural performance.
Coffee arrived in Papua New Guinea in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with commercial production expanding meaningfully in the Eastern Highlands from the late 1920s onward, and it has since grown into the country's second-largest agricultural export after oil palm, sustaining an estimated two and a half million people through smallholder farming rather than large corporate estates.