IKA and the Gayo Identity

Ihtiyeri Keti Ara is a family-owned supply chain and export business based in the town of Takengon and currently run by Irham Yunus and his daughter, Farina Ramadhani. The company works with various cooperatives in the region, collecting, processing, milling and exporting coffee of various types and profiles. The contributing farmers, who are typical of the region, have an average of just a few hectares of land and are spread across the hillsides of Bener Meriah and Central Aceh regencies, which together surround the high mountains to the north and south of Lake Tawar.

PT IKA, along with many local industries in the region, identifies itself as “Gayo”, after the Gayo ethnic group that has long called Aceh home, and which includes the majority of its farmer members.

Regional coffee distinctions in the northern provinces of Sumatra were originally (though no longer) based entirely on ethnicity, not geography. “Mandheling”, for example, was a catch-all label for a cultural group spread across Sumatra and Malaysia and has since become the broadest coffee trade term, applying to almost any wet blend selected from across the northern part of the island. “Batak” is a sub-ethnic group of the Mandheling people who live around Lake Toba and are considered a regional coffee lineage in their own right, and are often marketed as such. The terms are easily interchangeable, and it is often difficult to determine the exact origin of a coffee without a direct partnership that allows buyers to trace the entire value chain themselves. “Gayo” is another sub-ethnic group, who continue to have a very strong local identity in Aceh, often appearing in exports, restaurants, and clothing stores in the region that serve traditional Gayo designs.