Coconut water – the elixir of the elite

Paolo Kernahan

I paid $12 for a coconut last week and my life will never be the same. I even heard through the vervine that a coconut at the Queen’s Park Savannah in Metropolis has gotten as high as $15.

The idea of a $15 coconut on a tropical island is as nuts buying ice in a hailstorm. A coconut is easily more than twice the price of a soft drink on this island of ironies.

Yes, I made my own shocking discovery during a recent visit to a neighbourhood coconut vendor. His table, usually laden with coconuts, was uncharacteristically bare. The meagre offerings were small. In the days of yore when I’d have a coconut opened, it would almost feel like there was an infinite reservoir of water inside – my belly would bust if I tried to drink it all.

Nowadays the coconuts are so small and stingy that it’s like trying to suckle at the teat of a starved goat.

“Coconut skearce now,” said the vendor as his razor-sharp cutlass lopped off the head of a nut with only a whisper. “Some fellas came this morning looking to buy tentwo-litres.”

“Ten two-litres? Was it for a restaurant?” asked de Madam.

“Nah,” the vendor said. “That was for drinkin’ (alcohol)”

Many of us drink coconut water for our health. Many more still, for the ruination of our health. Although there’s something to be said for a bunch of guys looking to scare up that much chaser at around 6.30 on a Monday morning. That’s a serious commitment to serious liming. It had an aura of Caura about it.

On my morning walks in the savannah near to where I live (not the posh people savannah) talk of the coconut crisis has filtered through to conversations among the exercise crowd.

“I used to drink ah coconut every morning…!”

The chatter trailed off as two women walked briskly past me. There was enough in the tone to surmise that the storyteller has been forced to abandon that practice because of the extortionate pricing.

This past week I got caught behind one of those ancient, lopsided coconut pickup trucks – you know, the ones with the chassis that has scoliosis – and I kept thinking, this isn’t a coconut van. It’s a Brinks truck.

The price of coconuts has been on a steady march towards the ridiculous for several years now. A lifetime ago, when I was still young and in my liming phase a two-litre bottle of coconut water was already $60. The rum was only about $20 more. Eventually, coconut water became so expensive and often hard to get that we switched to rum and soda. For all you teetotallers who can’t relate, that’s like drinking Listerine – the original one, not the pleasant blue flavour.

The price we pay for a coconut today germinated in the industry's decline in the 70s and 80s. Pestilence devastated vast swathes of coconut cultivation. Along with other erosive factors, estates declined, becoming unfit and unprepared for an upsurge in global demand for coconuts and coconut-related products – a market valued in 2019 at close to US$5 billion.

Minister in the Ministry of Agriculture Avinash Singh spoke about the vitalisation of the coconut industry back in 2022.

The truth is, we’ve heard of such hollow promises several times before. We’ve known for decades that the industry was in peril. Many of the trees populating formerly productive estates were as old as a century and needed to be replaced.

A coconut tree takes three-eight years to bear fruit. Any serious attempts at revitalising the sector should have been started at least 20 years ago.

We knew this back then, yet here we are with the same old lip service today – and a $12 coconut.

The business model looks something like this: buyers traipse all over the country peeking in people’s yards for trees. Then they haggle for the best price to buy from the growers while risking their necks to scale the trees to pick the fruits. After that, they have to transport them to vendors, who themselves want the best price so they can make a decent profit.

Elsewhere, the pickers go to areas where there are coconut plantations on life support to try to scrape up enough nuts to ferry them to vendors.

The only change that can stabilise pricing and make sense of that nonsense is increased production. Where is the replanting frenzy?

This is TT, where we aspire to grow strawberries and import coconut water. Go figure.