Mary O'Shea – Armindo de Deus has worked all his life as a coffee farmer in the Ermera district of Timor-Leste. He is a wiry, weather-beaten man with darting, milky eyes. When asked what his family's other sources of income are, he looks puzzled.

"We are coffee farmers," he says, gesturing towards his daughter Elsa who is sifting through the coffee cherries spread out to dry. "Our life is coffee; we grow old with coffee and we are buried amid coffee."

The mountainous coffee-growing Ermera district is a world away from the capital Dili, where today, 11 years after independence, a small emerging middle class can be found sipping on piccolo lattes and frothy macchiatos at Gloria Jeans Coffee, the country's first international coffee shop.

And no place better demonstrates how little the rural poor have benefited to date from Timor-Leste's remarkable natural resource wealth than Ermera, the second most populous district. Here almost 90 per cent of the population are subsistence farmers who gain their income from coffee. Poverty levels are high and the 2010 census confirmed that the district has the lowest levels of literacy in the country.

And this is in the context of a desperately underdeveloped country. Timor-Leste ranked 134 in the 2012 United Nations Development Programme human development index, which measures a combination of life expectancy, educational attainment and income.

Now in his late 50s, Armindo de Deus presides over a household of nine. Becoming an agent for TimorCorp six years ago marked a change in his fortunes. Today he has a small concrete house and a hand-operated coffee pulping machine.

Harvest

As a coffee agent, he buys coffee cherries from local families who navigate the difficult mountain terrain every day during the three-month harvest season. All cherries are handpicked and in the late afternoon, a steady trail of people can be seen making their way back to their villages carting their crop in bags and baskets.

That coffee is important to Timor-Leste is clear. It has long been the country's leading agricultural commodity with almost 30 per cent of households nationwide reliant on the crop for their income. It is also Timor-Leste's second largest export, accounting for US$10 (euro 7.30) for every US$11 (euro 8) of non-oil exports.

However, what is also evident is that a disproportionate percentage of coffee farmers in Timor-Leste live below the poverty line. A recent study funded by the Australian government found that two thirds of coffee-dependent households surveyed in Ermera district earned US$250 (euro 183) or less from their annual coffee harvest.

Recognising the potential of coffee to improve livelihoods in Timor-Leste, a 2010 study by the World Bank said "managed correctly, coffee has the greatest potential for both increasing export earnings and reducing poverty". The phrase "managed correctly" however is a significant caveat.

During the country's fight for independence, coffee cultivation suffered years of neglect, with plantations serving as battlefields. Today, the impact of this neglect remains evident. Due to insufficient attention paid to the pruning and planting of new coffee trees, a significant number are producing poor quality hybrid coffee. The country's yields are half those of nearby Papua New Guinea.

While this is principally due to a lack of education, it is also a case of need. Rehabilitation of trees leads to a short-term fall in productive capacity, giving little incentive to households urgently needing income at the onset of the harvest season. TimorCorp general manager James Rutherford says "people tend to see coffee as a money tree in their back garden".

Long-term benefits

At the Co-operativa Cafe Timor (CCT) centre in Railaco, Dr Aris Wibawa, a longtime expert on coffee rehabilitation, explains that a coffee tree in Timor-Leste yields an annual average of 600 grams of cherry. After rehabilitation, within three years the tree's yield will increase to about 2kg. This means a plot of 2,500 trees per hectare that currently yields $510 per annum could earn $1,700 after pruning.