Behind the most expensive coffee in the world, Kopi Luwak, lies a terrible truth. Those who drink it should really be horrified, and not so much by the way it is made, since it is produced from the berries ingested, partially digested and defecated by the palm civet, but rather by the horrible abuses perpetrated against these animals.
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves him
Behind the most expensive coffee in the world, Kopi luwak, a terrible truth is hiding. Those who drink it should really be horrified, and not so much by the way it is made, since it is produced from the berries ingested, partially digested and defecated by the palm civet, but rather by the horrible abuses perpetrated against these animals.
The product, which achieved a certain fame also for its presence in the film "It's never too late", starring Jack Nicholson in 2007, has transformed in a few years from what was a small artisan production into agold ffare from 360 euros per kilo and peaks of 90 euros per cup, precisely because of the growing increase in demand. From here to the birth of specialized farms, which are now proliferating throughout Southeast Asia, the step was short.
Behind the record prices, unfortunately, there is a sad reality, like that documented by The Guardian, who visited a coffee shop in Medan on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, where they found a female civet being held in a cramped cage at the back of the room, separated from her two puppies who had been placed in another cage along with 20 others, all hidden on the roof of the building.
For animal rights groups, this would be the situation in which tens of thousands of civets live, all confined in tiny cages, forced to a life of imprisonment, to undergo mistreatment and to follow force-feeding, with ddebilitating hyeta made only of coffee beans. The civet, on the other hand, is mainly frugivorous and nourishes of berries, fleshy fruit such as mango, pineapple, melon, bananas and fruits of native species of ficus, as well as rarely also of small birds, rodents and insects. Instead, "guilty" of giving the coffee a very particular caramelized flavor with their gastric juices, these animals now even risk extinction precisely because of these new intensive farming.
“The conditions are terrible, really like those of battery chickens -explained Chris Sheperd of the NGO Traffic - the animals are captured, forced to live in very small cages and fed only with coffee. It is a spiral out of control, but public opinion knows nothing about it. But people need to know that tens of thousands of animals are being held in these conditions. They wouldn't buy this coffee if they knew".
Roberta Ragni
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