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Enduring appalling living conditions and an unhealthy diet, these nocturnal omnivores suffer mental distress - incessantly pacing and gnawing on their limbs - and succumb to illness and death. To satisfy global demand, many suppliers keep captured civets in cages and feed them almost exclusively on coffee cherries. While there are some ethical suppliers of hand-gathered civet coffee, recent investigations, both by journalists and animal-rights activists, have revealed a cruel and avaricious industry. The justification for these exorbitant prices? A claim that kopi luwak is sourced from wild animals and that only 500 kg of it is collected annually.
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The ultimate in caffeine bling is civet coffee packed in a Britannia-silver and 24-carat gold-plated bag, sold at the British department store Harrods for over $10,000. A cup sells for $30 to $100 in New York City and London, while 1 kg of roasted beans can fetch as much as $130 in Indonesia and five times more overseas. In the past 10 years, kopi luwak has won the hearts - and wallets - of global consumers. The civets’ digestive systems gave kopi luwak a uniquely rich aroma and smooth, rounded flavor - so much so that the Dutch plantation owners soon became die-hard fans. Forbidden from consuming coffee beans picked from the plants, they picked up, cleaned and then roasted the beans excreted by wild Asian palm civets that entered the plantations to eat the ripest coffee cherries. As folklore has it, civet coffee, or kopi luwak in Indonesian, was discovered by plantation workers in colonized Indonesia. Follow costliest coffee on earth has a humble proletarian beginning.