Sunday, January 31, 2010

Indang Cavite

A university Town that is home to Revolutionary Heroes, Cloud Rats, and the World’s Most Expensive Coffee.
By Randy V. Urlanda


During the cold nights of February up to the drizzly month of May, the woods fringing the coffee farms of the highland town of Indang in Cavite, Philippines, come to life when everyone else are asleep.

Palm civets, which have a broadly cat-like appearance with pointed snouts that inhabit the lush thickets of the Cavite highlands, clamber down from their lofty habitat atop coconut trees to forage on their favorite seasonal treat-raw, ripe berries of coffee trees that abound during that period.

Called Alamid locally, this omnivorous, long-tailed mammal that is 700-mm-long and weighs up to five kilos, counts the red coffee berries as part of its normal diet. The Alamid, which is a nocturnal creature that sleeps atop coconut fronds during daytime, eats the berries at night, but the beans, which have absorbed stomach enzymes, pass through its system undigested.

Folks gather the bracelet –like civet dung scattered along river banks and streams that is embedded with undigested coffee beans. Civets, when they have a fill of their favorite food, drink from the numerous waterways that crisscross the water-rich town 30 minutes away from the resort city of Tagaytay in the south.

Experts have proposed that enzymes in the stomach of the civet add to the coffee’s flavor by breaking down the proteins that give coffee its bitter taste. The beans are defecated in bracelet-like form then washed, and lightly roasted so as not to destroy the complex flavors that develop through the process.

Kape Alamid (kopi luwak in Indonesia) is the most expensive coffee in the world. One small café, the Heritage Tea Rooms in the hills outside Townsville in Queensland, Australia has ‘kopi luwak’ on the menu at US$48 per cup, or a whooping Php2, 352 (at Php49 per US$1)! In a gourmet coffee shop in Tagaytay City, a cup of freshly brewed ‘kape alamid’ costs Php300.

Aside from its ripe coffee berry loving civet population, Indang is also home to another fruit lover – the giant cloud rat, Phloeomys cumingi (Southern Luzon slender-tailed cloud rat), one of six known species of cloud rat which is endemic in the Philippines. They range in size from 2.6 to 15 kilograms.

Called kunehong gubat (forest rabbit) by local folks, this beautiful nocturnal animal with dense, soft reddish brown fur with a black mask around its large dark eyes, small round ears, a broad and blunt snout and a long tail covered with dark hair, lives in the thick canopy of 20-meter-tall ‘irok’ (Arega pinnata), whose fruits, which are its favourite food, are boiled in sugar syrup and called ‘kaong’. Its sap is fermented into vinegar and wine.

These big deep-rooted feather palm Irok trees are not only the source of kaong and vinegar but also protect water tables and water sources. The town has 67 springs, some gushing out 281 liters per second. These springs, which have high alkaline content, flows down to rivers and streams where civets, who just had a fill of ripe coffee berries, drink and defecate on river banks and creek sides, which are gathered by ‘kape alamid’processors.

At 380 meters above sea level, nippy Indang, a third-class municipality and one of Cavite’s 23 towns and two cities and home to the 102 year-old CvSU (Cavite State University), formerly called Don Severino Agricultural College, is the “fruit basket” and “salad bowl” of the province. The town derived its name from a big tree called yndan (also known as anubing), which thrived in this upland area in the olden days.

“Due to these ideal natural attributes, including a pleasant climate year round, we have decided to put up a five-hectare agri-eco farm in Barangay Banaba seven kilometres northwest of town,” explains Mayor Dimero, a staunch clean and green environment advocate whose just celebrated its 353rd foundation anniversary last December 1. “We combined both urban and rural farming methods so that there will always be vegetables on the table, harvested right from one’s backyard or house’s terrace.

“Instead of ornamental plants, we encourage residents here to plant pechay in plastic soda bottles, so when you need a few leaves in cooking nilagang baka (beef stew) all you have to do is just cut them from the plant.”

To really have a trash-free environment, Dimero, a mechanical engineer by profession and an excellent lobbyist for funds when he was still the town’s vice mayor, also plans to put a material recovery facility (MRF) where non-biodegradable plastic garbage and the like could be made into bricks, while biodegradable refuse would be converted into compost for organic farming.

Riding on the trend of going back to nature health care, the municipal government is also allocating a 1,000 square-meter herbal plant areawhere medicinal plants like serpentine, whose leaves are twice as bitter than that of ampalaya, for diabetes, katakataka, whose thick leaves is good to lower fever, cassava and guava, which are good for ulcers, and a host of the Department of Health (DOH) tested and approved herbal remedies, which will be distributed to Indang’s rural health units.

Like Tagaytay City, which is 16 kilometers south of Indang and some of other nine highland towns comprising the third district of the province, which are famous for fruits, Indang, not only grow sweet pineapple, papaya and mango, but also claims to grow the best tasting dargon fruit, which it pioneered to farm in 2003 in the country.

Aside from producing sweet-tasting fruits and the most expensive coffee in the world, Indang has a glorious past. Its six revolutionary heroes namely: Don Severino de las Alas, a philanthropist and two-term mayor who donated the land now occupied by CvSU, which was formerly named after him, Jose Elias Coronel, a doctor; Hugo Ilagan, a lawyer and educator; Raymundo C. Jeciel, a colonel of the Revolutionary Army under General Emilio Aguinaldo; Ambrosio Mojica, a general of the Revolutionary Army, and Jose D. Mojica, who played an important role during the revolution of 1896, and fought against the Americans until the surrender of Aguinaldo. When peace came, they returned to normal life as community leaders and worked for the improvement and development of their town and its people.

With all these good things going on for them, Indang’s local government units aim to push through with their progress, cleanliness and peace and orderliness campaign through their unity with their more than 60,000 inhabitants. Fortunately, they all put a premium on environment protection, which in turn gives them clean air and water, and abundant crops.

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