Pepper Bunch (Dutch: pepertros) denoted the bunch (Dutch: tros) of pepper berries together with some leaves, harvested from the pepper vine (Piper nigrum) cultivated in the residency of Atjeh in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The bunch could be harvested at different stages of maturity: unripe, yielding black pepper after sun-drying; fully ripe, yielding red berries (Dutch: roode bessen); or treated by water-soaking to remove the fruit flesh, yielding white pepper — the seed kernel alone. The pepertros was thus the basic harvest unit from which the entire family of Acehnese pepper products was derived, and the choice of harvest stage was the principal decision by which the Atjeh smallholder steered production between the black- and white-pepper market segments.
The pepper vine and its cultivation
The pepper vine (Piper nigrum) was trained up living support trees — typically gliricidia, dadap or Erythrina — in the pepper gardens (Dutch: pepertuinen) that surrounded every Acehnese village in the pepper districts. The vines came into commercial bearing at three years of age, reached full production at six to eight years, and continued to yield for fifteen to twenty years. The pepper gardens of the Pidië coast and the West Coast of Atjeh were the demographic and economic heart of the pre-colonial Acehnese sultanate and supported dense populations of smallholder cultivators; the pepertros was the principal cash-yielding harvest of these gardens and the foundation of the Atjeh pepper trade with Europe and the Islamic world.
Two flowering and fruiting cycles occurred each year, producing two harvests (Dutch: oegsten): the larger main harvest (Dutch: grote oogst) and the smaller off-season harvest (Dutch: kleine oogst). Each vine bore numerous pepertrossen of 50 to 150 berries, the bunch hanging pendant from the support tree in long, slender spikes of 7 to 15 centimetres.
Harvesting stages and their products
The pepertros could be harvested at three distinct stages of maturity, each yielding a different commercial product:
- Unripe (Dutch: onrijp): The whole bunch was cut from the vine while the berries were still small, hard and green, then spread on a flat mat or earth floor and dried in the sun. As the fruit flesh dried it shrivelled and turned black, producing the familiar wrinkled black peppercorn of commerce — black pepper (Dutch: zwarte peper). This was the simplest and most common form of Atjeh pepper.
- Ripe (Dutch: rijp): The bunch was left on the vine until the berries turned red (Dutch: roode bessen), at which point only the red berries were harvested by hand-picking. The fully ripe berries could be sun-dried into red pepper (Dutch: roode peper), or — more commonly — subjected to water-treatment to produce white pepper.
- Water-treated (Dutch: geplept or geweekt): The ripe red berries were soaked in water for several days, during which the soft outer fruit flesh (Dutch: vruchtvlees) rotted and could be rubbed away, leaving only the smooth greyish-white seed kernel. The kernel was then washed, sun-dried, and marketed as white pepper (Dutch: witte peper) — the most labour-intensive but also the highest-priced form of Atjeh pepper.
The choice of harvest stage was a market decision. Black pepper, being simpler to produce, commanded the lower price and dominated the bulk trade; white pepper, requiring the additional water-treatment step, commanded a premium and was favoured for the European table-trade in lightly coloured sauces and condiments.
Economic context and decline
Pepper was once a dominant export crop of Atjeh — the pepertros of the Pidië and Westkust gardens supplied the great entrepôt of Banda Aceh throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the VOC factors at Kuta Raja recorded it as a premium-quality commodity. The pepper trade declined markedly in the late nineteenth century, however, owing to insufficient agronomic practices, disease in the older plantings, and competition from European-managed pepper gardens on Java and Bangka.
The protracted Aceh War of 1873 disrupted cultivation, destroyed pepper gardens, and drove smallholders from the land. After the pacification, the Agrarische Wet 1870 regime of long-lease erfpacht concessions encouraged the expansion of European rubber, copra and palm oil estates at the expense of smallholder pepper. The Atjehsche peper- en pinanghasil of the landschapskas nonetheless still yielded f 125,000 from pepper in 1913, making it the largest miscellaneous pepper revenue of any Buitenbezittingen gewest. By the 1930s pepper had ceased to be a major Atjeh export, though the pepertros continued to be harvested in the smallholder gardens of the interior.
See Also
- Black Pepper (Aceh)
- White Pepper (Aceh)
- Atjehsche peper- en pinanghasil
- Pinangnut (Betel Nut)
- Sultanate of Acheh
- Aceh War
- Pacification of Aceh
- Agrarische Wet 1870
- Java
- Bangka
- Dutch East India Company
- 1913
- 1930
Source
DLP-84-Atjeh.pdf, pp. 13-14.