内容摘要：Judge Brodie sentenced Malaysian national Ng to 10 years’ imprisonment in March 2023 for, among other crimes, “conspiring to launder billions of dollars embezzled” from 1MDB and paying more than $1.6bn in bribes.

Judge Brodie sentenced Malaysian national Ng to 10 years’ imprisonment in March 2023 for, among other crimes, “conspiring to launder billions of dollars embezzled” from 1MDB and paying more than $1.6bn in bribes.

Now, a growing band of cafes, roasteries and farms across the state are looking to give Nagaland a new identity by promoting locally grown Arabica and Robusta coffee. Juro Coffee House is among them.While coffee was first introduced to the state in 1981 by the Coffee Board of India, a body set up by the Indian government to promote coffee production, it only began to take off after 2014.

Helped by government policy changes and pushed by a set of young entrepreneurs, Nagaland today has almost 250 coffee farms spread across 10,700 hectares (26,400 acres) of land in 11 districts. About 9,500 farmers are engaged in coffee cultivation, according to the state government. The small state bordering Myanmar today boasts of eight roastery units, besides homegrown cafes mushrooming in major cities like Dimapur and Kohima, and interior districts like Mokokchung and Mon.For Searon Yanthan, the founder of Juro Coffee House, the journey began with COVID-19, when the pandemic forced Naga youth studying or working in other parts of India or abroad to return home. But this became a blessing in disguise since they brought back value to the state, says Yanthan. “My father used to say, those were the days when we used to export people,” he told Al Jazeera. “Now it’s time to export our products and ideas, not the people.”Like many kids his age, Yanthan left Nagaland for higher studies in 2010, first landing up in the southern city of Chennai for high school and then the northern state of Punjab for his undergraduate studies, before dropping out to study in Bangalore. “I studied commerce but the only subject I was good in was entrepreneurship,” said the 30-year-old founder, dressed in a pair of smart formal cotton pants and a baby pink polo neck shirt.

The pandemic hit just as he was about to graduate, and Yanthan left with no degree in hand. One day, he sneaked into a government vehicle from Dimapur during the COVID-19 lockdown – when only essential services like medical and government workers were allowed to move around – to return to his family farm estate, 112km (70 miles) from state capital Kohima, where his dad first started growing coffee in 2015.He ended up spending seven months at the farm during lockdown and realised that coffee farmers didn’t know much about the quality of beans, which wasn’t surprising considering coffee is not a household beverage among Nagas and other ethnic communities in India’s northeast.

Yanthan, who launched Lithanro Coffee, the parent company behind Juro, in 2021, started visiting other farms, working with farmers on improving coffee quality and maintaining plantations. Once his own processing unit was set up, he began hosting other coffee farmers, offering them a manually brewed cup of their own produce.

Gradually, he built a relationship with 200 farmers from whom he sources beans today, besides the coffee grown on his farm.“I thought it was much easier to buy online than searching for a store in an unfamiliar country.”

Nearly 1,400 companies, including many of the most internationally recognisable brands, have since February 2022 announced that they would cease or dial back their operations in Russia in protest of Moscow’s military aggression against Ukraine.But two years after the invasion, many of these companies’ products are still widely sold in Russia, in many cases in violation of Western-led sanctions, a months-long investigation by Al Jazeera has found.

Aided by the Russian government’s legalisation of parallel imports, Russian businesses have established a network of alternative supply chains to import restricted goods through third countries.The companies that make the products have been either unwilling or unable to clamp down on these unofficial distribution networks.