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Extracts from Black Gold by
Antony Wild
Chapters 1, 15 and 18
Chapter 1
The Way We Live Now
I see I have been bitter. But what would you think of someone who could write such things without bitterness?
'multatuli', Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (1860)
The catastrophically low price currently paid to the producers of coffee is leading to the largest enforced global lay-off of workers in history. Nonetheless, it is remarkable how little agreement there is concerning the numbers of people who are dependent on coffee growing for their livelihood. The Wall Street Journal, a news-paper not given to exaggeration in matters of business, estimated that some 125 million people depended on coffee in 2002. ActionAid claimed 60 million, Fair Trade 100 million. The World Bank has calculated that there are 25 million small producers in developing countries who depend on coffee as their sole source of income, each supporting an average of five family members: this is the equivalent of the entire population of Japan, the world's eighth most populous country. Furthermore, the Bank estimates that a staggering 500 million people globally are involved directly or indirectly in the coffee trade. This figure is echoed by Dow Jones Commodity Services, which also assesses the importance of coffee to developed countries too: they have calculated, inter alia, that 300,000 people work in Italy's 110,000 coffee shops, serving 70 million cups of espresso per day.
The coffee market in the USA is worth $19 billion annually, with 161 million
consumers directly serviced by 150,000 full- or part-time workers. The Specialty
Association of America estimates that if everyone from coffee machine mechanics
to styrofoam cup makers were accounted for, the figure
for those involved in the business would leap to
1.5 million. In Japan, a leading roaster has claimed
that over 3 million jobs - 4.5 per cent of
the workforce - are directly or indirectly
related to coffee. While the industry is keen to
stress the importance of coffee, if only to alert politicians
to the gravity of the problems affecting it, clearly
there is huge international dependence on the trade.
As long as the price that coffee fetches on the
world market continues to be lower than the cost
of production, smallholders and farmers must subsidize
coffee consumers. They cannot do this indefinitely.
The result is unemployment and the loss of livelihood
on the vast scale commensurate with the numbers
previously employed. Thus the World Bank estimates
that between the years 2000 and 2002 some 600,000
workers in the coffee industry lost their jobs
in Central America alone. This is the equivalent
of the entire population of the city of Bristol
becoming unemployed. With no sign of a meaningful
price recovery, this employment crisis is getting
much worse, rapidly and globally. It has started
to cause political and social disruption, poverty
and privation on an unprecedented level in countries
where the national economies are frequently already
extremely fragile. There has also been a fundamental
shift in the recipients of the coffee trade's
largesse. In 1991 the global coffee market was
worth around $30 billion, of which producing countries
received $12 billion, or 40 per cent. Current figures
suggest that the global revenues from coffee sales
are in the region of $55 billion, of which only
$7 billion (13 per cent) goes to the exporting
nations. Coffee is the world's most valuable
trading commodity after oil, but the share of the
coffee trade enjoyed by producers has fallen by
two-thirds in ten years, whilst transnational coffee
companies have reaped huge windfall profits from
the low price that they now need to pay for the
commodity. The average price paid to producers
of coffee internationally has fallen 80 per cent
since their last high in 1997: over the same period,
the average retail price of the keenly competitive
major US brands has fallen to $2.75 per pound,
only 27 per cent less than its peak. The price
of instant coffee in the UK, which represents 85
per cent of that market, has fallen by a paltry
5 per cent since the same date. The four multinational
roasters that dominate the world coffee trade -
Procter & Gamble,
Nestlé, Sara Lee, and Phillip Morris account
for 40 per cent between them - report record
sales and record profits, although all except Sara
Lee ($495 million in reported profits from their
coffee and tea division) are understandably chary
of stating exactly how much is attributable to
coffee. Nestlé attributed a significant
proportion of its 5.5 per cent half-year growth
in sales to August 2003 to its 'star performers',
instant coffee and bottled water.
Starbucks, a relative newcomer to the international
coffee trade, is likewise reaping a huge profit
harvest, up 19 per cent in 2003, and adding to
its 6000 existing stores worldwide almost daily.
The business is regarded as that rare breed, a
'tastemaker', a company that successfully creates
a new market.
Starbucks has repositioned coffee as an 'affordable
luxury', and has provided a suitably mellow
environment for people to indulge in it. The company's
Chairman and Chief Global Strategist, Howard Schultz,
is a lean corporate colossus fêted by stock
analysts and the business press. He is the 'author'
of the soft-focus New Age autohagiography entitled
Pour Your Heart Into It in which he writes that
'My
ultimate aim . . . is to reassure people to have
the courage to persevere, to keep following their
hearts even when others scoff. Don't be beaten
down by naysayers.' It is unlikely that the
smallholder abandoning his coffee plantation in
Guatemala for a dismally uncertain future in a
city shanty-town would derive any comfort from
Schultz's inspirational message. The price
that his coffee achieves in the branded coffee
shops of the developed world clearly spells out
imbalance and inequity. Starbucks generally buys
better coffee than many companies, and consequently
pays the higher price by which its Public Relations
division sets great store; but it is no coincidence
that the company has become one of the prime targets
of the anti-globalization movement. It has come
to represent the unacceptable face of unfettered
capitalism with its combination of modern aspirational
marketing techniques and an attritional strategy
towards its independent competitors. Crucially,
in the eyes of activists, it also has a lead product
that is effectively subsidized by the suffering
of Third World farmers.
The widening gap between the haves and the have-nots
in our globalized economy is brutally exemplified
by the growing inequalities in the coffee trade,
and, just as politicians in wealthy Western nations
respond to popular concerns about Third World poverty
with spin rather than substance, so the major corporations
that have benefited from the current world coffee
crisis have demonstrated a notable
lack of commitment to doing anything about it beyond
window dressing. Procter & Gamble, makers of
Folgers, maintain that they contributed $10 million
to community programmes in Mexico, Brazil, and
Venezuela. Kraft, Sara Lee, and Nestlé claim
that they go out of their way to help small producers,
'ensuring that they receive the full value of their
crop',
according to a Nestlé spokesman. Presumably
this comment is designed to reassure concerned
consumers that the transnationals do not actually
steal the coffee at gunpoint.
The poverty of the world's coffee farmers
contrasts with the coffee trade's wealth
of statistics. Most of these emanate from an unremarkable
1960s office block in Berners Street, just north
of Oxford Street in London, in which can be found
the down-at-heel remnants of the once globally
powerful International Coffee Organization (ICO).
Funded by coffee-producing nations (invariably
tropical and undeveloped), as well as consuming
nations (generally Western and developed), in its
heyday the ICO, with all its undoubted flaws, was
a pragmatic attempt by the world coffee trade to
mitigate the effects of wilder fluctuations in
coffee prices. These arose from a combination of
over-supply punctuated by periodic crop failures
in Brazil. Although the motivation for the creation
of the ICO was primarily commercial rather than
philanthropic - chronic instability in a
market is bad for business - the net effect
was to impose limits on the gap between poverty
and privilege in the coffee trade. Mandated by
the International Coffee Agreement (ICA), which
was signed under the auspices of the United Nations,
the ICO promoted, regulated, monitored, and administered
the ICA, which worked through an elaborate quota
system permitting the pre-agreed restriction or
expansion of coffee supplies to keep prices within
certain thresholds. However, the full functioning
of the ICO required the active participation of
the USA, consumer of 25 per cent of the world's
coffee. Whilst there was a perceived threat of
creeping Communism in the coffee-producing countries
of Central America, it was in the best interests
of the USA to support the ICA in order to help
defuse social unrest in its backyard; but with
the break-up of the Soviet Union this raison d'être
evaporated and the ideologically driven policies
of laissez-faire capitalism were given full rein.
An international commodity-price control agreement
had no place at the neo-liberal economic table,
and the USA withdrew its support for the ICA in
the late 1980s, and from the ICO itself six years
later. The importance of the Berners Street headquarters
of the ICO thus diminished; the research laboratory,
lecture theatre and other facilities were closed
down, and the promotional budget was
slashed. The organization still hosts meetings
of the member nations, and still compiles statistics
with commendable zeal, but is a shadow of its former
self.
The problems resulting from the market free-for-all
unleashed by the US withdrawal from the ICA were
exacerbated by the World Bank and its cousin, the
Asian Development Bank. Both of these institutions
had lent heavily to Vietnam in the mid 1990s in
line with their mandate to stimulate low-cost production
and end market inefficiencies. Having massively
defoliated the nation with Agent Orange during
the Vietnam War, the USA promoted - through
the World Bank, in which it has a controlling stake - the
refoliation of Vietnam with low-grade Robusta coffee
bushes, with a devastating effect on the other
Third World economies dependent on coffee. From
its previous position as a very minor producer
of coffee, by the year 2000 Vietnam had become
the world's second largest coffee producer
after Brazil, exporting 9 million bags of 60 kilos
each - still of low-quality Robusta - which,
along with Brazilian coffees harvested by machines,
were produced at a labour cost of one-third of
that required for the higher-quality Arabicas of
many other producing countries.
The result of the Vietnamese expansion was a catastrophic
fall in prices, as well as a considerable falling-off
in the quality of coffee blends internationally.
Robusta is a coarse-flavoured strain of the coffee
plant that is more resistant
to disease than its refined cousin, Arabica. It
is also considerably cheaper and, despite its low
quality, represents an opportunity for roasters
to improve their margins. The flood of Vietnamese
Robusta on to the market depressed the price of
all coffees, and thus the smallholders elsewhere
who tended to the plantations producing high-quality
Arabicas found their margins inexorably squeezed.
Good coffee comes at a price, and for many that
price could not be obtained on the world's
markets any more. The situation was sufficiently
serious for the usually conservative coffee trade
magazines to produce hand-wringing editorials:
'Vietnam is now the Number Two world producer of
coffee - plenty
of Robusta for all and more. Yet roasters claim
there's little if any Robusta in their blends.
Well, who is buying it all then - the man
in the moon?' The men in the moon in the
form of traders in Germany, Italy, and Poland devised
a new method of steaming Robusta coffee to remove
the worst of its harsh flavours, allowing roasters
to use even more in their blends. Junk retailers
sold junk coffee to junk consumers at the lowest
price point. The World Bank remained unrepentant.
'Vietnam has become a successful producer,' said
Don
Mitchell, principal economist at the Bank. 'In
general, we consider it to be a huge success.'
However, fulfilling the dire predictions concerning
the 'race
for the bottom' (the tendency for export
markets for Third World products to migrate to
whichever country has the cheapest labour) made
by many international NGOs and aid organizations,
one of the victims of Vietnam's success recently
has been Vietnam itself. The price of coffee has
tumbled so far that farmers there are starting
to tear up the newly maturing coffee bushes because
they cannot cover the costs of production. The
unsubstantiated rumours that China, with its vast
low-paid labour force, has started to gear up for
the creation of a large-scale coffee industry,
assisted by Nestlé, may mean that Vietnamese
coffee will be further priced out of the market
and that the country's brief moment in the
sun will be over.
While coffee-producing countries fight over the
diminishing scraps falling from the consuming countries'
table, a separate coffee futures industry flourishes
in
London and New York. Coffee futures were originally
designed as a financial instrument to enable coffee
traders to hedge against windfall gains or losses
resulting from movements in coffee prices over
time. The creation of a futures market depends
upon there being an acceptable set standard of
coffee that forms the basic unit of contract -
the New York 'C' market uses contracts
based on 'Other Milds' (including Colombian,
Kenyan, and Tanzanian Arabica), the London market
uses Robusta coffees. The creation of these standards
has been possible because of the relatively predictable
nature of coffee production: tea, a commodity that
varies much more by the year, the season, the weather,
and the day of picking, has yet to evolve a futures
market because it has not been possible for traders
to find, let alone agree upon, a homogeneous type
to form the unit of contract.
The coffee futures market is a financial instrument
that has now assumed a life of its own largely
abstracted from the real trade in coffee. Speculators
and investment funds trade on the market with no
intention of ever seeing a single coffee bean delivered.
It is grimly ironic that, whilst coffee farmers
struggle for survival, the capitalist institutions
based on the same commodity flourish, and it is
no coincidence that when the vast trading floor
of the New York Coffee, Sugar & Cocoa Exchange,
formerly housed in the World Trade Center, was
destroyed on 11 September 2001, it was able to
resume business almost seamlessly in contingency
premises prepared after the previous bomb attack
in 1993 and maintained at a cost of $350,000 a
year. The Third World, in the meantime, has neither
the financial resources nor the political infrastructure
to be able to respond meaningfully to the crisis
it faces. The only international organization of
coffee growers, the Association of Coffee Producing
Countries, shut its doors in January 2002. Although
speaking for over 70 per cent of the world's
production, it was unable to find unanimity amongst
its member countries, never mind amongst those
outside the organization. Colombia's Federation
of Coffee Growers, a central buying and marketing
organization which for over seventy-five years
had successfully helped its smallholder members
to absorb the worst of global coffee price cycles,
is now straining under additional pressure from
the increasing violence and instability of that
country. The membership is sometimes turning
to illegal coca cultivation in desperation. 'Colombia
is facing a deep internal crisis related very much
to the situation of drugs and coffee,' the
Secretary General of the association of producers
reported. Similar national marketing organizations
in other producing countries have collapsed over
the last ten years, defeated by the World Bank
and the IMF's insistence on placing stringent
conditions on loans to countries operating any
constraint over the free market. The Nicaraguan
Government, for instance, had to drop proposals
to delay fore-
closures on loans to coffee growers after intensive
pressure from the IMF and the Inter-American Bank.
The large-scale social unrest forecasted as a result
of the poverty and displacement caused by the near-collapse
of the coffee industry continues to grow. New Guinea
highlanders are reported to be abandoning their
plantations; Indian and African smallholders have
uprooted their worthless coffee plants; Nicaraguan
coffee workers marched on Managua and fourteen
of their counterparts from the oppressed state
of Chiapas in Mexico were found dead of starvation
and dehydration in the Arizona desert, where they
had been dumped by the people they had paid to
smuggle them into the USA. By 2001, Oxfam had reported
that, in real terms, 'coffee prices are lower
than they have ever been' and that a minimum
price mechanism of $1 a pound should be installed - roughly
double the prevailing price. The newly formed British
Coffee Association of leading roasters dismissed
the report's findings as 'too short
term', although they conveniently neglected
to come up with a long-term alternative.
While there is evidence that 'Fair Trade' coffees
have had a significant impact on a minority of
consumers, the four trans-national roasters that
dominate
the world coffee trade and the six multinational
exporters that control 40 per cent of the export
trade are unlikely to turn into corporate do-gooders
overnight. The central concept of Fair Trade coffee
- that the price paid for coffee allows growers
to receive
a living wage - has also remained of marginal interest
to cut-price
retailers and bargain-hunting consumers alike.
Similarly, 'shade grown' and 'bird-friendly' coffees
- those grown in a more environmentally sensitive
way that
helps to preserve the local ecosystem and migratory
bird life - have found their way onto the
shelves in the USA, but the industry as a whole
continues to back technologies that bring down
the costs of production with scant regard for the
social or environmental costs.
The most recent manifestation of this tendency
was the announcement that a new Genetically Modified
coffee is in development that would allow the ripening
of coffee beans on the bushes to be triggered chemically,
obviating the need for the labour-intensive process
of harvesting the bushes repeatedly by hand as
they produce a mixture of flowers, unripe cherries
and ripe cherries. By cutting back on labour requirements,
the new GM technology threatens primarily the livelihood
of producers of high-quality Arabicas. In Brazil,
where quality standards are less demanding, one
pass with a vast coffee-harvesting machine already
does the trick for over half of the coffee grown
there. The producers of quality Arabicas are precisely
the ones suffering most from the current crisis
in the industry, so the prospect of GM coffee is
a particularly cruel blow. Those who back the technology
say that it will enable poor coffee farmers to
control the timing of the harvest and enable them
to grow other crops. Detractors point out that
it will also enslave them to the use of specific - and
expensive - proprietary seeds and chemicals,
with no guarantee that they will receive higher
prices for their coffee.
The development of GM coffee - which will
probably be ready for the market within five years
- has been possible because coffee is the single
most scientifically scrutinized
of foodstuffs. Coffee science is in part research
and development, in part a concerted attempt by
the industry to combat the attacks made by the
medical profession on coffee, and particularly
caffeine, its most active ingredient. Funded largely
by the transnationals, bulletins extolling the
health properties of coffee issue forth from apparently
independent scientific bodies, while anti-caffeine
scientists and campaigners fight battles for legislation
to curb the widespread, unregulated use of the
drug, not just in coffee, but also increasingly
in soft drinks and 'energy' drinks.
The world consumes the equivalent of 120,000 tonnes
of pure caffeine per annum, just over half in the
form of coffee. Caffeine itself is a white alkaloid
with a sufficiently pronounced bitter taste to
make its absence noticeable in decaffeinated coffees.
It is possible to kill oneself with a caffeine
overdose: about ten grams, or the equivalent of
a hundred cups of coffee rapidly consumed, will
do the trick for an adult, making Balzac's
daily consumption of sixty cups of coffee decidedly
risky. Less than 3.5 grams is lethal for children,
and early researchers showed that 'a 1⁄67
of a grain of caffeine will kill a frog of moderate
size', should you happen to have such a frog
that you have ceased to be fond of. Smoking increases
the rate at which caffeine is metabolized by the
body (smokers therefore experience less effect),
whereas drinking decreases it. Caffeine does not
counteract the debilitating effect of alcohol although
it may give the illusion of so doing. Caffeine
intoxication has its own entry in the USA's
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
The diagnostic criteria assume the recent consumption
of more than 250mg (50mg less than the daily recommended
safe dose), and as well as the usual suspects include
gastrointestinal disturbance, muscle twitching,
rambling flow of thought and speech, tachycardia
or cardiac arrhythmia (palpitations), and psychomotor
agitation. They do not include the 'bilateral
burning feet' and 'restless leg' syndromes
that have been clinically noted elsewhere. Caffeine
intoxication can tip over into caffeine psychosis,
which can produce hallucinations: truck drivers
in the USA have reported being pursued by balls
of white light, which suggests that caffeine psychosis
could explain the widespread belief in UFOs in
that country. It is also claimed that caffeine
'is
capable of undermining psychological well-being',
although there are individual variations in sensitivity
- 'patients with anxiety disorders may find the
normal effects
distressing, whilst the non-anxious find them pleasant
and stimulating'. Long-term caffeine intoxication,
which is called 'caffeinism', is more
common in psychiatric patients, who in general
consume more caffeine than the rest of the population.
Caffeine is believed to cause urinary incontinence
in the elderly, and has been found (with unknown
effects) in the systems of new-born infants who
do not have the necessary liver enzyme to metabolize
it. There is also evidence to suggest that caffeine
can cause osteoporosis as it increases the rate
of calcium elimination from the body. On the plus
side, caffeine is used to treat neonatal apnoea
(cessation of the spontaneous breathing of an infant)
and to increase sperm mobility.
It is remarkable that we voluntarily introduce
this powerful drug into our systems knowing so
little about what it might be doing to us. While
the producing countries face ruin, the West, so
the gainsayers maintain, has become a dangerously
caffeinated society. The cheap, coarse-flavoured
Robusta coffees that are dragging world prices
down contain twice as much caffeine as higher quality
Arabicas. There are the first signs that the effect
of the increased use of these Robusta coffees in
blends is causing a slowdown in consumption, as
coffee drinkers, consciously or unconsciously troubled
by the stronger caffeine hit of their usual brew,
are drinking less coffee. The impact of health
and quality issues on coffee consumption may yet
add another problematic dimension to a coffee trade
that is already in turmoil.
The explosive growth of the 'specialty' coffee
market, led by the USA, may represent the only
future survival mechanism for a few fortunate farmers.
This market maintains its upward momentum largely
through the ability of the coffee roasters' buyers
to single out distinguished, high-quality coffee
producers in countries of origin. Since
the price of 'commodity' coffee has
been so low for so long, there is a real prospect
that even prod-ucers of quality Arabicas may be
unable to continue in the trade. However, a few
coffees may rise from their ranks to become specialty
coffees, their historical and gustatory qualities
nurtured by buyers and thus be capable
of fetching viable prices. Many are called but
few are chosen; as a result, the discrepancy between
the price that a specialty buyer is willing to
pay for such a coffee and the more run-of-the-mill
types is increasing. It is feared by many in the
trade that this will quickly lead to a two-tier
coffee market for producers and consumers alike,
one in which the vast majority of coffee is of
a low quality - probably Brazilian and Vietnamese
- sold competitively to cost-conscious consumers,
and
a small amount is marketed as a refined, luxury
item for the true aficionado. This polarization
will weigh particularly heavily on the producers
of good-quality but not necessarily very distinguished
Arabicas. Thus mainstream Arabica coffees from
countries such as Honduras, Ethiopia, or El Salvador
are largely ignored by the specialty market because
they lack distinction either of flavour or pedigree,
and as a result they are forced to compete with
Brazil and Vietnam.
Coffee has always marched hand in hand with colonialism
through the pages of history. It was once known
as the 'Wine of Araby', and the trade
in coffee was an important component in the creation
and consolidation of the Ottoman Empire in the
sixteenth century. It was first consumed in the
late fifteenth century as a sacred ritual amongst
the Sufis in Yemen, whence it quickly spread through
Islam. In that religion, despite some initial opposition,
it was considered an acceptable stimulant because,
unlike the reviled alcohol, it never left the drinker
'incapable of distinguishing a man from a woman
or the earth
from the heavens'. The popular coffee houses
of Cairo and Constantinople attracted the attention
of the first European visitors to the Orient, and
eventually coffee itself appeared in most of Europe
at the same time as merchants, sailors, and adventurers
from that continent were starting to establish,
largely through superiority of arms and technology,
their fledgling trading empires. Coffee was amongst
a number of valuable and desirable oriental goods
that they sought, but its supply was effectively
under the monopolistic control of Ottomans. By
the early eighteenth century the Dutch, the French,
and the British had managed to obtain coffee seedlings
to take to their own tropical colonial possessions,
there to be cultivated under the plantation system
worked by slave or near-slave labour. Slavery,
with its attendant horrors, persisted as the preferred
method of coffee production in many colonies until
abolition, or in the case of Brazil until as recently
as 1888, by which time coffee had become a thoroughly
globalized commodity. The so-called benefits of
the colonial plantation system were mainly experienced
by the consumers in the home countries of these
various European empires, who responded with alacrity
to the low price and ready availability of what
had formerly been a rare luxury.
Coffee had become universally consumed in the nations
of Europe and in the USA, much of it in coffee
houses that became meeting places for men of commerce,
politics, and culture. The effect of caffeine itself
ensured that there were always likely to be lively,
well-informed debates and intense, original exchanges,
in contrast to the only other public meeting places
of the time, the tavern or the church. The coffee
house played a pivotal role
in the creation of many of the financial institutions
that in turn supported the expansionist trading
empires that had led to the growth of coffee consumption
in the first place. Lloyds of London, the maritime
insurance company, emerged from the interests of
the clientele of Lloyds Coffee House who gathered
there to exchange news and gossip concerning the
movement of ships. Coffee was an important commodity
shipped from afar, and thus the fledgling insurance
business conducted at Lloyds in part provided the
financial structure whereby the risks of the coffee
trade itself could be mitigated.
This feedback loop of cause-and-effect, fuelled
by caffeine, underpinned the dramatic rise of capitalism
and its most successful offspring, globalization.
Coffee lay at the very heart of the triumph of
free-market economics in our times: that it is
now suffering the awful consequences of that same
ethos is ironic, but horribly apt.
With the dieback of former European imperialism,
and the increasing assertion of the hegemony of
the USA over the western hemisphere, the many coffee-producing
countries of Central and South America have found
themselves overtaken by US neo-colonialism. Many
of those countries
are deeply dependent on coffee for export income,
and because their northern neighbour consumes 25
per cent of the world's supplies but chooses
to buy 75 per cent of its needs from their southern
neighbours, inevitably coffee became a significant
factor in hemispherical geopolitics. Economies
that are historically coffee-based have created
the ground rules by which a ruling oligarchy can
impose its will on the unrepresented masses. The
sweatshop economies of much of Central America
and the Caribbean depend upon the political élite's
control of the media and the military apparatus,
and the structure of the coffee trade provided
the working model. El Salvador, for example, a
country which until recently was dependent on coffee
for over half its export income, now derives 57
per cent of that from the 'garment industry'.
Arguably, along with the world economy as a whole,
the coffee trade has reverted to a paradigm that
more closely resembles the height of the European
colonialism, albeit now under US domination, than
the protectionism that prevailed during the era
when strong, liberal, democratic Western nation
states allied against the threat of Communism.
The fact that the date of the dissolution of the
International Coffee Agreement broadly coincided
with that of the fall of the Berlin Wall is by
no means coincidental: the USA, having vanquished
its most serious rival, no longer saw the need
to humour its more liberal allies.
The catalytic effect of coffee-house culture on
the emergence of those financial and cultural institutions
that underpinned the rise of Western capitalism
should not be underestimated. The coffee houses
of the City of London were the progenitors of such
global institutions as the Stock Exchange and Lloyds,
and those of Covent Garden and St James's
were the seedbeds of the Royal Society and the
Enlightenment. Coffee gradually gave way to tea
in England, but the imposition of taxes on tea
in the American colonies precipitated the Boston
Tea Party, the actual as well as the ideological
rejection of tea, and the triumph of coffee in
America, where coffee houses became the foremost
meeting places for merchants, politicians, and
businessmen. The Declaration of Independence was
first read publicly outside the Merchant's
Coffee House in Philadelphia, and President-elect
George Washington was ceremonially welcomed to
New York in front of (another) Merchant's
Coffee House - which had, amongst other things,
formerly hosted slave auctions - a week before
his inauguration. If he had been able to walk from
there but a few hundred yards and a couple of centuries
in time he would have come to the Coffee, Sugar and
Cocoa
Exchange in 4, World Trade Center, which was to
be destroyed in the 9/11 attacks master-minded
by Osama bin Laden, whose forbears came from Yemen,
itself the original home of the coffee trade. One
of the purported reasons why the World Trade Center
was targeted was because the towers were a symbol
of the Western financial institutions that were
accused of destroying traditional Islam: coffee
played a significant role in the evolution of both.
Coffee is now falling victim to globalization:
then, it played an intimate part in its rise.
Chapter 15
The Battle of the Hemispheres:
The Old Empire of Tea versus the New Empire of Coffee
We can divide the world of coffee conveniently
into two hemispheres: the Americas and the rest.
There are pressing geopolitical reasons why the
plantation industries in the colonies of the old
British Empire, focused on tea, differ from those
of the American Empire, focused on coffee. The
former British colonies are now major consumers
of the beverage they grow: the latter operate through
corporate colonialism, which obviates the need
for territorial occupation and any concomitant
responsibilities, however poorly discharged. By
effectively tying coffee farmers to a small number
of transnational buyers and creating, through institutions
such as the World Bank, trading conditions that
demolish any internal, national controls on the
trade, the corporations have profited hugely while
the farmers' share of the revenue pie has
diminished from 40 per cent in 1991 to 13 per cent
at the present time. Historically, tea also differed
from coffee in that there was very substantial
existing production and consumption of the beverage
in pre-colonial China, Japan, and other Asian countries,
whereas the discovery and rise of coffee coincided
almost exactly with the expansion of European colonial
power. The increased demand for tea in Europe could
for a long time be met by the expansion of Chinese
production, and it was not until the 1830s that
the East India Company made serious efforts to
introduce tea planting to India and other colonial
territories. One result is that, of the top ten
tea producing countries of today, four are former
British colonies, and of the top ten consuming
countries five are producers themselves, a further
three are other ex-British colonies, and number
five is Britain herself. These figures reveal an
interesting legacy of the British Empire: it initiated
the production of tea in some of its colonies and
consumption was enthusiastically taken up by the
people of its adoptive countries.
TEA
Top Ten Producers '000 tonnes
1. India 806
2. China 676
3. Sri Lanka 284
4. Kenya 249
5. Turkey 171
6. Indonesia 165
7. Japan 89
8. Iran 60
9. Argentina 50
10. Bangladesh 47 |
Top Ten Consumers '000 tonnes
1. India 655
2. China 478
3. Turkey 166
4. Russia 153
5. United Kingdom 137
6. Japan 137
7. Pakistan 108
8. United States 93
9. Iran 91
10. Egypt 73 |
(Source: Economist World in Figures 2002)
It is also interesting to find the presence of significant tea drinking in
countries of the former Ottoman Empire - Egypt and Turkey - which
would seem to suggest that tea is the favoured drink of waning empires. Once
Islam had gone into a general decline, Muslim countries, such as Iran, adopted
what some see as the more introspective, less excitable tea to accompany the
contemplation of their former glories.
The Western Hemisphere
The French invasion under Napoleon of the Iberian peninsula in 1808 led to
the collapse of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies. The most far-reaching
effect of this was on their former colonies in the western hemisphere, in South
and Central America. Coffee production in many of those countries was to become
a very significant force in the economic and political life of those fledgling
nations. Coffee, from being an exotic plant of the mysterious East, became
a vital product of the post-colonial West.
As we have seen, the monopoly on coffee cultivation held by Yemen and Ethiopia
was broken relatively quickly, and the colonial powers, initially the Dutch,
English, and French, but later also the Portuguese and Spanish, introduced
coffee under a plantation system into whatever appropriate colony was to hand.
For the French and the English the conditions most favourable to the introduction
of coffee planting could be found in the West Indies, where colonization and
imported slaves had already combined with brutal efficiency. The Dutch, in
their colonies in Java and Sumatra, had to find rather more subtle means to
get the local population to do their dirty work, a more difficult task but
one they set their minds to with a vengeance. When America achieved independence
and turned its back on tea, it therefore had within its backyard the means
to satisfy the increased demand for coffee. The islands of the West Indies
initially supplied their needs, but then, as consumption expanded both in America
and Europe, the newly independent countries of Central and South America took
up coffee production. They had nearly all abolished slavery, as being inconsistent
with their own revolutionary ideals.
However, they exchanged the overt colonial masters of Spain and Portugal for
the more discreet domination of the British Empire. A phrase that to modern
ears sounds like jingoistic hyperbole, 'Britannia Rules the Waves',
was a profound global truth after the defeat of Napoleon. The sea was the means
whereby international trade was conducted and military force exerted; domination
of the sea lanes by the Royal Navy gave unparalleled control of the conduct
of inter-national affairs to Britain. After successful independence movements
of the 1820s had freed many Central and South American countries from Spain,
George Canning, the British Foreign Secretary, could remark with assurance
in 1824 that 'Spanish America is free and, if we do not mismanage our
affairs sadly, she is English.' The assumption that freedom and Englishness
amounted to the same thing was a fundamental quality of the British imperial
mindset.
Britain had by then done a curious and unprecedented thing: she used her immense
naval power for the imposition of the greatest act of imperial philanthropy
the world had yet seen. The official abolition of the slave trade in 1808 was
enforced, initially hesitantly but later with greater and greater resolve,
by ships of the British West Africa Squadron. Countries such as Denmark and
Argentina, which had a minor interest in the trade but a great interest in
British goodwill, swiftly joined the campaign. Others, more dependent on the
slave economy, fell into line much more slowly. Whilst the implementation of
the abolition of slavery was riven with contradictions, there is no doubt that
it was British perseverance, allied to British power, that finally removed
the scourge of legitimate slavery from most of the world. Indeed it was only
because she was a global imperial power that Britain was able to impose her
will in this way. Rival contemporary European powers often sought a hidden
motive for Britain's apparent philanthropy, and saw it as a 'grab
for power'. Why else should the foremost slave trading nation at the
end of the eighteenth century seek its abolition early in the nineteenth? The
answer was God, or at least that God who had apparently endorsed slavery as
a manifestation of his divine will, had suddenly had second thoughts and had
determined that it was vile and despicable. Ably represented by the Abolitionist
movement and their champion in Parliament, William Wilberforce, God got his
new message across to all social levels of the nation. The seed of doubt, once
sown in the fertile soil of the collective conscience, grew with start-
ling rapidity: it was the speed with which Britain reversed her position on
slavery that, more than anything, aroused the suspicions of her rivals.
With the inexorable rise of American power, Britain gradually lost its influence
over the western hemisphere. The brief occupation of Cuba in 1898 signalled
the first tentative step of American imperialism, and that country's
influence over its backyard increased exponentially during the twentieth century.
Of the top ten coffee producing countries today, four are in Central and South
America and Indonesia still figures in fifth place - in part a legacy
of the Dutch era, although the country now produces a great deal of Robusta
coffee. The top ten consuming countries, with the exception of Brazil at number
two and Ethiopia at nine, are America first, and then other Western European
countries plus Japan at four. In other words, and in contrast to tea, the flow
between coffee production and consumption is primarily from developing countries
to Western countries, and there is far less of an internal market for the major
producers than there is with tea. Coffee thus continues to be a much more overt
product of the historical colonial system. India and China have a significant
national interest in the well-being of their tea industries. With the partial
exception of Brazil, which consumes 40 per cent of what it produces, the same
principle does not apply readily to coffee.
COFFEE
Top Ten Producers '000 tonnes
1. Brazil 1941
2. Vietnam 676
3. Colombia 560
4. Mexico 387
5. Indonesia 361
6. Cote d'Ivoire 328
7. India 324
8. Guatemala 312
9. Ethiopia 210
10. Uganda 186 |
Top Ten Consumers '000 tonnes
1. United States 1121
2. Brazil 765
3. Germany 567
4. Japan 404
5. France 319
6. Italy 307
7. Spain 188
8. United Kingdom 138
9. Ethiopia 98
10. Netherlands 95 |
(Source: Economist World in Figures 2002)
The European powers used to maintain a significant commercial
loyalty to their former colonies when it came to their coffee-buying habits.
The French, having
made the mistake of colonizing the Robusta producing countries of West Africa,
formed an affection for its particular taste that stood in stark contrast
to their discernment respecting other foodstuffs. The Dutch still relish the
heavy
body and low acidity of Indonesian coffees. The British, having colonized
Kenya, discovered to their surprise that they had the makings of one of the
best coffees
in the world, and aristo-cratic Europeans flocked there to establish plantations
- most famously Karen Blixen ('Isak Dinesen'), who discovered to her chagrin
that the land she had bought was above the height limit for coffee growing,
leaving her plenty of time on her hands to fly around the country with tousle-haired
Old Etonians. Since the 1970s, with the onward march of globalization, such
historical trading patterns have been increasingly blurred. The French have
discovered the virtues of good coffee, ending their years of gustatory exile,
and are increasingly replacing Robustas with high-quality Arabicas. The British
have discovered espresso and cappuccino, and thereby reduced links with their
old East African partner - Kenyan coffees perform poorly in espresso
machines. Only the USA has remained consistently loyal to its backyard: of
coffee drunk there, a higher proportion (75 per cent) comes from the western
hemisphere than would be expected on a pro rata basis.
The Americas
The western hemisphere produces two-thirds of the world's coffee and
consumes a third of it. As the biggest single consuming nation (some 25 per
cent of worldwide production) the USA has, with impeccable economic foresight,
regarded the countries of Central, and to a lesser extent South, America,
as Uncle Sam's backyard. Although overt colonialism is making a comeback,
the USA, until relatively recently, has adopted a covert approach to the
achievement
of its economic hegemony in Central and South America. Much of this was driven
by two considerations: countering the threat of 'Communism' (or
indeed anything with the faintest taint of socialism), and maintaining regimes
'sympathetic' to America and American business in place, which have in nearly
every case been oligarchical or military. As the latter created the
conditions in which the former flourished, there was always a fundamental
structural weakness in the strategy, causing problems that could be countered
only by
ever more repressive regimes. Thus in support of this flawed approach these
countries have witnessed, and continue to witness, an unending series of
acts of state terrorism perpetrated by the US in the form of interference
in the
electoral process through violence and intimidation, assassination, funding
of guerrilla armies and death squads, illicit gun and drug running, and,
when considered necessary, direct military intervention.
Until recently the coffee industry played a very significant role, being
the means by which the élite got and maintained their wealth, and conversely
was the principal cause of the grievances of the poor and dispossessed peasantry.
This historic imbalance lurks in the foundations of the political and social
structures of the region, even as they transform themselves into 'modern' economies.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the perceived 'Communist' threat
has substantially diminished while the US economic stranglehold on the region
has likewise increased through the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994)
and its possible replacement, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (2005), will
encompass the entire hemisphere except Cuba.
The net effect for coffee producers has been that the USA no longer feels
any political need to address their problems through the International Coffee
Agreement,
which collapsed in 1989 when it withdrew its support. The threat of economic
sanctions (usually applied through the World Bank and the IMF) is sufficient
to cow most of the population. The remaining 'hardliners' (Communists,
trade unionists, and other dissenters) can be dealt with through military
action, usually via the provision of equipment and technical support to the
preferred
regime. Under these circumstances it is very difficult for a left-leaning
regime to get elected, or, once elected, to stay in power. With control of
the media
remaining in the hands of the oligarchy, and with the global financial markets
reacting favourably or unfavourably to candidates according to their sympathies,
elections have become increasingly a meaningless sham, designed principally
to maintain the fiction for the American public that their country stands
for freedom and democracy.
The islands of the Caribbean were the pre-eminent global producers of coffee
whilst under the direct rule of European colonial powers, principally France
in Saint-Domingue but also Britain in Jamaica and Spain in Cuba. The Napoleonic
Wars devastated demand from Continental Europe, and many of the islands converted
to sugar cultivation. When normal trade was resumed, the competition from
the newly established mainland coffee industries of Brazil, Venezuela, Guatemala,
and Costa Rica was too strong for the residual island plantations. The abolition
of slavery dealt the final blow, and whilst the Caribbean remains a small
producer
of coffee, the real action is in the continental Americas.
Coffee books traditionally take the reader for a comforting stroll through
the flavour variations of coffee, country by country. We will take that walk
through Central and South America also, pausing now and then to admire the
local history and politics as well. In some countries we judge to be of particular
interest, we will halt, and look in some detail.
Central America
The doleful consequences of US hegemony and that nation's support of any
anti-Communist activity, however venal and anti-democratic, with the concomitant
litany of
human rights abuses, death squads, and impoverished
citizenry, can be read like a roll-call in a southward sweep through Central
and South America. With the exception of Mexico, which has had a more diversified
economy since it became the great source of cheap manufactures for North
America, the states of Central America are - or were until the recent collapse
in prices - all heavily dependent on coffee for their export income.
Coffee sustains their economies, but also sustains the entrenched land-owning
oligarchies that control the industry, and hence the political and military
machines that preserve the status quo. Historically, since the establishment
of coffee growing in the late nineteenth century, many of these coffee countries
had been effectively near-slave states. The wealthy coffee plantation owners
(frequently foreigners, and in the case of Guatemala of German origin) would,
in cahoots with the government, coerce migrant labour
down from the neighbouring highlands, the menfolk often selling their wives'
labour in exchange for an advance, with the women then perhaps being subjected
to
rape or abuse. Frequently the land that the coffee was grown on - by
definition, fertile and at high altitude - was appropriated from indigenes
who then became the first guerrillas to fight against the same government
policies
that had allowed their communal lands to be stolen. The refrains of 'Land
Reform' and 'Liberal' politics in Central America were frequently
the high-minded packaging in which the government endorsed the theft. The
creation of wealthy land-owning coffee farmers to whom the nominal government
was deeply
beholden created a cycle of suppression of political debate and the press,
the use of the police and bureaucracy as an instrument of fear, and the replacement
of any government that failed to behave in an accommodating fashion towards
the coffee oligarchy. Under these circumstances, the only expression of opposition
was out-and-out rebellion: in El Salvador in the 1880s the displaced Indians
rebelled, to be faced with well-armed militias; in Nicaragua the Indians laid
siege to Matagalpa, and more than a thousand were killed by the army.
In modern times left-wing insurgency in all these countries has been countered
ruthlessly by the army or police, themselves often trained at the notorious
School of the Americas at Fort Benning in Georgia, which used to be under
almost permanent siege by protesters against human rights abuses. In the
1960s, the
School was known in Latin America as the escuela de golpes or 'coup school',
owing to the high number of ex-alumni who became involved in overthrowing
Central or South American governments. When some of the Spanish-language
training manuals
used at the School until 1991 were released by the Pentagon in 1996 after
pressure from activists, a New York Times editorial commented: 'Americans
can
now read for themselves some of the noxious lessons that the United States
Army taught to thousands of Latin American military and police officers at
the School of the Americas during the 1980s'. A training manual recently
released by the Pentagon recommended interrogation techniques like torture,
execution, blackmail and arresting relatives of those being questioned.'
Other lessons to be learned included assassination, mind-control, and electoral
fraud.
The School has recently vowed to change its ways, but the fact remains that
the political and economic structure in most of these countries is inherited
from this strong-arm approach allied to coffee interests.
Mexico
Coffee represents 1 per cent of Mexico's export earnings, and employs
4 million people directly and indirectly on 120,000 farms, 100,000 of which
are less than 5 hectares. Two hundred thousand indigenous Indians farm less
than 2 hectares of coffee. Mexican coffee has a pronounced acidity but has
a tendency to a lack of body. Mexican politics has a tendency to dictatorship
and corruption and, more recently, an accommodating attitude to every economic
policy that the USA suggests. Whilst the government bends over backwards
to provide tax breaks to sweatshop manufacturing industries, it virtually
ignores
the plight of its coffee farmers, whose coffee is fetching such a low price
that they cannot afford to pick it. Coffee fields may be torn down to make
way for corn so that
the families can at least eat. The environmental damage this causes will
be serious, for coffee plantations are often a halfway house between forest
and
field.
Much Mexican coffee is grown in the Chiapas region in the south of the country
bordering Guatemala. Chiapas is the most rebellious of the Mexican provinces
and is home to the Zapatista revolutionary movement, which is being ruthlessly
suppressed by the government, supported by a fleet of US 'advisors'. Severe
disruption in the early 1990s by the Zapatistas was ascribed to low coffee
prices: the area was subsequently militarized under the guidance of graduates
of the School of the Americas, who now routinely terrorize the indigenous
population. The main reason for this appears to be that the Zapatistas' desire
for
autonomy conflicts with the aims of President Vicente Fox's 'Plan
Pueblo Panama', which envisages the use of the province for the large-scale
production of a range of export crops. This, along with the current coffee
price collapse, seems to have prompted widespread migration from the area,
contributing further to the chaos in the cities and desperate attempts to
enter the US illegally: in Arizona in 2001, fourteen former coffee pickers
from Chiapas
were found dead, suffocated in the back of the truck that had smuggled them
in.
Guatemala
Guatemalan coffee is traditionally amongst the best in Central America: Guatemalan
politics have traditionally been amongst the worst. Coffee directly or indirectly
supports the lives of a third of the population of 6 million, and the country
is the eighth biggest producer in the world. The largest fifty or so haciendas
are owned mostly by families of German origin, but there are some 60,000
very small family holdings. Even in today's market, coffee represents nearly
10 per cent of the country's export income.
Nowhere better typifies the very worst of Central American politics than
Guatemala. The alliance of Central American states that declared independence
from Spain
in 1821 lasted only until 1838, when it fractured into its component parts.
The Mayan indigenes of Guatemala found themselves forced off their lands,
and to avoid effective slavery fled to the high mountains. Coffee started
actively
to be grown in 1853, but it was found that the best land for its cultivation,
the Pacific side of the country in the rich volcanic soil around Antigua,
was occupied by lately exiled Mayans. The standard-issue liberal land reform
statutes
were enacted, which legalized the dispossession of the Indians, and coffee
became a major industry, relying heavily on the forced labour of those same
Indians. They in turn developed an understandable tendency to try to escape
from the plantations, and the result was the development of a disproportionately
large army to stop them doing so. A wave of German immigration in the late
nineteenth century consolidated the larger farms: they, and the economy of
the country as a whole, were still dependent on the exploitation of the labour
of local Indians, and the army to enforce it.
Thus a tight knit, largely German coffee oligarchy supported by a ruthless
army became the de facto government of the country. This became rather alarming
when the Second World War broke out, particularly as many in the German community
were openly sympathetic to the Nazis. Those Germans who opposed Hitler were
placed on a secret Gestapo hit list, to be disposed of on victory. The end
of the Second World War saw the first attempts at social reform in Guatemala,
particularly under the nationalist Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, who nationalized
land that was lying fallow, some belonging to an American business, the United
Fruit
Company. That could not be tolerated: he had to go, and he did, in a CIA-engineered
coup of 1954. The ill-substantiated threat of 'Communist infiltration' provided
the necessary justification, and the CIA's new man in charge ensured
that the ownership of all lands was returned to the status quo ante existing
before the date of the reforms. Arbenz was no Communist: he had merely wanted
to change Guatemala from a 'dependent nation with a semi-colonial economy
into an economically independent country'. Independent also of US hegemony,
which proved to be his downfall.
Having lovingly crafted a repressive, one-party regime, the US spent the
next thirty-six years trying to keep it, and its later manifestations, in
place.
The coffee élite had no complaints: they were still able to
rely on the cheap labour that the military helped keep cheap by employing the
tried and tested techniques of the School of the Americas on 'subversives',
including the rape and torture of an American nun, Diane Ortiz, who was later
to claim that one of the perpetrators was actually an American. The former
Defence Minister, Hector Gramajo Morales, later memorably explained his social
policy: 'We instituted civil affairs [in 1982] which provides development
for 70% of the population, while we kill 30%. Before, the strategy was to kill
100%.' Whatever the percentage, it is estimated that some 200,000 people were
killed in Guatemala up until 1996.
Bill Clinton stated in 1999 that US support for oppressive regimes in Guatemala
had been 'wrong', which must have brought great comfort to those
who had suffered from its effects for thirty-six years since Arbenz's
death. The highly fragile truce in the civil war currently holds, but largely
in name only: there are still death squads who pick off 'subversives',
and the military is still substantially armed and trained by the USA. The
larger coffee plantations are still owned by the élite, protected by high walls
and armed guards, and the workers are still housed in barracks where they may
or may not receive the statutory minimum wage of $2.48 a day, and the basic
education and health care that the law provides for.
El Salvador
Ten per cent of the 6.5 million population of El Salvador are dependent directly
or indirectly on coffee, which represents 15 per cent of GNP and over 5 per
cent of export earnings, down from 96 per cent in 1936 and 50 per cent in
1990. (Fifty-seven per cent of export earnings now come from the garment
industry.)
The high-grown coffee of nondescript quality was mostly exported to Germany
until the recent price crisis - some of the wealthy coffee plantation
owners are of German origin. Forty thousand jobs have recently been lost
and 70 per cent of the small farms are effectively abandoned, meaning that
no cleaning,
pruning, or fertilizing is taking place.
In July 2002 a Federal Court in West Palm Beach, Florida ordered two retired
generals from El Salvador to pay $54.6 million dollars in damages to three
Salvadorean citizens tortured by security forces twenty years previously.
The generals, one a former minister of defence and the other the head of
the National
Guard, had been honoured by the USA and were living a respectable retirement
in Florida. They had previously been acquitted of complicity in the murder
of three American nuns, their defence lawyer claiming that their courageous
defence of democracy could be likened to that of Thomas Jefferson and John
Adams. This echoes President Reagan's infamous characterization of the
Contras in Nicaragua as freedom fighters in the mould of the Founding Fathers.
Abuses of history are as much part of the armoury of American statecraft
as abuses of demo-cracy. On this occasion the mountain of evidence from credible
witnesses connecting the defendants directly to the torture of the plaintiffs
was irrefutable, and stories emerged of how government troops hunted down
suspected
guerrilla sympathizers, leaving bodies littering the streets and killing
entire villages.
El Salvador was, and is, heavily dependent on coffee. The American support
of the oligarchy was thus mainly support of the coffee élite. In the
case of El Mozote, where up to a thousand elderly men, women, and children
were brutally murdered, ten of the twelve soldiers eventually accused of the
massacre had trained at the School of the Americas.
The lives of Salvadorean governments have been 'nasty, brutish, and short',
usually involving the military - also, since the Second World War, often
trained at the School of the Americas. Rios Montt, a particularly unsavoury
President during the 1980s, ensured that not only were supposedly left-wing
agitators disposed of under his regime, but also indigenous Mayan Indians,
many of whom inhabited the highlands most suitable for the cultivation of
coffee. Over 100,000 of these indigenes are supposed to have been killed
during his
time. This was, however, only a continuation of an honourable Salvadorean
tradition dating back to the nineteenth century, when liberal land reforms
led to the
appropriation of the lands of the indigenes for coffee farming and the concentration
of that land in the hands of fourteen families. Indians revolted throughout
the 1880s, but were violently suppressed by well-equipped militias.
Honduras
The coffee industry of Honduras today represents some 10 per cent of export
income, down by over a third from five years ago. Six hundred thousand of
the population of 3 million are dependent on it. There are about 45,000 farms,
some organized into co-operatives. Honduran coffee, particularly that grown
at the highest altitudes, can be very decent, if rarely exceptional. In general
it is a good, clean-cupping, reasonably priced 'filler' coffee
for use in blends. Honduran politics have been dire since the end of the
Second
World War, its large production of bananas making it the political model
for the 'Banana Republic'.
Military dictatorships, assassinations, torture, CIA-advised counter-insurgency
operations - the whole gamut of the USA's patronage can be seen
at work in Honduras, especially during the 1980s when the country housed
the celebrated Reagan-era Contras, a rag-tag partly mercenary army of US-funded
'freedom fighters' set up to oust the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who were
in
some danger of running the country with a semblance of social justice. Oxfam,
as we have seen, commented at the time that the Sandinistas were 'exceptional
in the strength of that government's commitment . . . to improving the
condition of the people and encouraging their active participation in the
development process'. Naturally they too had to go, and the Contras were
put together
to do the job from Honduras. The only problem was how to get them funded
without arousing the suspicions of Congress. The three-year investigation
undertaken
by the Kerry Committee of the Senate found out how it was done: 'There
was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zones on the part
of individual Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots, mercenaries who worked
with the Contras, and Contra supporters throughout the region . . . In each
case, one or another agency of the US Government had information regarding
the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter
. . . Senior US policy makers were not immune to the idea that drug money
was
a perfect solution to the Contras' funding problems.'
The US Government had covertly adopted Colonel Oliver North's idea of
funding the actions of the Contras by drug running. It is this concept that
appears to have matured into a fully fledged part of US government subculture,
and which is increasingly being played out against the volatile backdrop
of Colombia.
Nicaragua
Coffee represents nearly 15 per cent of the export earnings of Nicaragua
on about 17,000 farms. It is estimated that some 300,000 people formerly
dependent
on coffee for their livelihood have been made unemployed by the current coffee
crisis. The coffee is light- to medium-cup, with a fairly metallic acidity,
more fragrant in the best qualities. Not amongst the best coffees of Central
America, but quite drinkable as a 'single origin' coffee. The country's
politics, however, are one of the most depressing examples of the baleful
influence of the USA's avuncular role in Central America.
The notorious Anastasio Somoza García came to power in the 1930s. As
well as ruling with an iron rod, he and his family owned forty-three of the
largest coffee plantations in the country. Any sign of dissent was ruthlessly
suppressed until finally the Sandinistas (named after the nationalist leader
Augusto César Sandino) came to power in 1978 by deposing the old tyrant
and setting up reform programmes with progressive social ideas such as building
schools and hospitals. Initially, President Jimmy Carter did what he could
to lessen the threat of 'another Cuba' through conventional diplomatic
and economic channels. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 led to the formation
of the Contras, who burnt down the schools and hospitals. Horrific scenes of
rape and pillage took place, all paid for by the US Government who also took
the opportunity to engage in some illegal harbour mining in the area.
After a decade of constant struggle, the 1990 election saw the defeat of
the Sandinistas by a population exhausted not by their rule but by the trouble
that their rule brought in its wake. Some elements of the Sandinistas' social
reform programmes, in particular the land reforms, have remained in place,
and Nicaragua is still a country where co-operative movements flourish, particularly
in the coffee industry. One such, PROODECOOP, was started in 1993 to help
its
members with finance and with production and marketing advice. It has 45
co-operatives on its books supporting 2500 families, each of which farms
about ten acres.
PROODECOOP is also involved in the construction of schools and clinics and
provides legal advice for members. It has also initiated an innovative project
in conjunction with Global Exchange in San Francisco (which promotes Fair
Trade coffee) whereby interested parties are invited to pay their way to
Nicaragua
for the coffee harvest, staying a minimum of two weeks and having their expenses
there paid. This suggests that the problems experienced by Nicaragua in the
1980s still resonate with Western consumers, and that the country remains
something of a byword for social justice.
Whilst this is encouraging - and many such Fair Trade initiatives can
be found throughout Central and South America - it is evident that these
self-created pockets of a more just society have been forced into a marginalized
existence within the kind of globalized macro-economic environment as represented
by NAFTA and its progeny.
The Nicaraguan government is believed to be corrupt and inefficient: it has
also signed up to an agreement with the IMF to maintain a minimum balance
of international reserves, which means that a fund set up
from coffee farmers' contributions in better times to support coffee
farmers in lean ones, such as currently exist, is effectively frozen. Another
initiative to suspend all foreclosures on coffee farmers for 300 days was
unanimously passed by the Nicaraguan National Assembly in 2001 but vetoed
by the President
under pressure from the IMF and the Inter-American Bank, which latter threatened
to suspend a $50 million loan. Thus farmers who may have acquired a modest
10-acre smallholding as a result of the Sandinistas' land reforms may
see that holding repossessed as a result of the pressures of the international
financial institutions that wield effective power over the governments of
states that have borrowed from them.
Costa Rica
Three hundred thousand of the 2.5 million inhabitants of Costa Rica are dependent
on coffee for their livelihood, many on smallholdings that are linked in
co-operatives that are in turn members of a Federation that processes and
exports their coffees.
With its reputation for very high quality - good Costa Rican coffee,
particularly from the Pacific side of the country, has all the best attributes
of Central American coffees - the country has been able to benefit significantly
from the boom in the specialty coffee trade in the USA.
The survival of Costa Rica as the 'Switzerland of Central America',
a democratic, stable, and relatively prosperous state amidst the chaos and
poverty of its neighbours, is something of a mystery. It may be coincidental,
but it is also the country that dispossessed fewest indigenous people in
the colonial and post-colonial era. This was not necessarily the result of
a benign
social policy, but more because
there were few Indians there to begin with. Nonetheless, the land was not
overly stained by the blood of displaced indigenes, and has rewarded its
current occupiers
with the finest coffees and a largely untroubled political landscape.
Panama
Panama completes the southwards tour of the Central American isthmus. Its
two million inhabitants grow a small amount of coffee, but it has increasingly
become a popular origin for new speciality coffee for the US. As the country
is always associated with the canal, it is surprising to find that the landscape
of much of Panama is very mountainous.
The country was carved away from Colombia in 1903, and its all-important
canal remained under US control until 1999. As a warning to the future guardians
of the canal, and to send clear
signals to its neighbours, the USA invaded Panama in 1989, ostensibly to
get its President, General Manuel Noriega, who was accused of drug smuggling
- to
which the US had turned a blind eye to while he was a useful ally. Thousands
of innocent Panamanians were killed or wounded, and Noriega sought refuge
at the Vatican Embassy from where he was eventually prised by the unbearably
loud
rock music that the Americans blasted at him.
South America
The coffee-producing countries of South America include Colombia, Venezuela,
Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and, of course, Brazil. Even Paraguay and Argentina
have modest coffee industries, leaving the coffee continent only Uruguay
and Chile short of a full country set. However, South America is also a continent
where many other vital commodities - oil, copper, coal, tin, sugar, soya
beans, iron ore, and gold to mention but a few - can be found in significant
quantities, as well as manufacturing and other industries. Thus on the whole,
the dependence of the countries of the region on coffee is markedly smaller
than in Central America, and the effects of the coffee trade on the economy
and politics of a given country is less marked. Brazil, as we have seen,
was
dominated by coffee interests in the nineteenth century, but although it
is still the number one producer worldwide, today its economy is much more
mixed.
However, one country, Colombia, which is currently vying with Vietnam for
number two status, is in a highly volatile state at the time of writing,
and deserves
to be looked at in some detail for what it can tell us about coffee in the
world today.
Colombia
Colombia exported $866 million of coffee in 2002, down from $1.7 billion
five years earlier. This represents one-sixth of the value of petroleum and
related
exports, and about the same as that of coal. It has some 300,000 coffee farms,
of which 40 per cent are less than a hectare in size. Half a million people
- of a total population of 40 million - live off the coffee industry, directly
or indirectly. Good Colombian coffee should have a medium body, a clean cup,
and a fine acidity. Unlike Kenya coffees, in which the acidity is allied
to
a pronounced fruitiness, the Colombian acidity is allied to a nutty flavour.
The additional refinement of a Supremo overlays these characteristics with
an element of sweetness.
Until recently, the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros (FNC), the non-governmental
organization that controls the coffee industry in Colombia, was a model of
good order and the envy of exporting countries the world over.
Undermined by
war, terrorism, and disastrously low coffee prices it was in danger of imploding,
its funds exhausted, and the consequences for the peasant coffee farmers of
Colombia, already in desperate straits, would have been terminal. Drastic layoffs
and restructuring have enabled it to secure a reprieve from the government,
predicated on a return to a more favourable coffee market by 2005. It would
take a brave gambler to bet the farm on that.
Colombia used to be, until the appearance of Vietnam on the world stage,
the second largest grower of coffee after Brazil, producing about a million
tonnes
in an average year. The general quality is significantly higher than that
of its big rival, partly a result of higher altitude - the three cordilleras
on which it is grown run up the spine of the country and are part of the
Andes
range - but also because the coffees are all washed, whereas those of
Brazil are natural, or unwashed. Most of the coffee is marketed through the
FNC, which buys the parchment coffee from smallholders, mills and grades
it, and handles its distribution and what happens in sales. Unlike what happens
in many countries, where the peasant smallholders are frequently the first
to suffer from the vagaries of the international marketplace, or forced to
wait many months for a return on their crop, the FNC has a long-standing
and
largely patrician relationship with the growers. For example, until recently,
in times of very low coffee prices, the FNC would effectively subsidize the
price it paid to the smallholders from funds built up in more prosperous
times.
Enormous quantities of Colombian coffees are exported to the USA and find
their way into the ubiquitous, infinitely refillable American breakfast mug,
where
the coffee is usually so weak as to be unrecognizable, and whatever qualities
it may possess are destroyed by the 'cream'. The European market
is more demanding, and as a result a more carefully processed grade known
as 'European Preparation' is produced for that market. For a coffee blender,
the overriding
feature of Colombian coffee is its consistency. It sets a high standard and
sticks to it tenaciously. This consistency is a result partly of the well-run
industry, but may also be a consequence of the fact that, uniquely amongst
producing countries, Colombia's coffee trees have no season and are harvested
all the year round. Colombian coffee is thus an ideal component of a blend,
being of good quality, readily available, and very reliable.
This reassuring portrait of Colombian coffee production presupposes that
all is well in the Colombian body politic, that its economy is reasonably
stable,
and that the FNC can continue to smooth out the peaks and troughs without
outside interference. However, all that is under threat: the civil war is
escalating
as the US seeks to defend its oil interests, World Bank strictures have led
to a doubling of unemployment in the last ten years, and there has been a
30 per cent drop in real terms in the national average income. Agriculture,
formerly
the mainstay of the nation's economy, has gone into steep decline, with
2 million acres of arable land lying vacant whilst imports of food have soared.
And the FNC - that remarkably enduring experiment in a centralized, planned,
co-operative organization - can hardly hold back the tidal waves of free
trade and globalization. Coffee farmers in the 'Zona Cafetera' are
abandoning previously flourishing coffee farms, or taking to coca and poppy
planting to supplement their income. In the south, where such plants are
more widespread, US planes spray them from the air with Monsanto's Roundup
or Roundup-Ultra (its more virulent form), killing all and any crops, polluting
the rivers, and causing widespread health problems, as well as laying waste
over a million acres in the last five years. When a demonstration
of the sprayer's accuracy was mounted to impress visiting US Senator
Paul Wellstone, a Democrat opposed to American military aid for Colombia,
he
and his aides were accidentally drenched in the herbicide. Before it could
be determined what long-term harm may have befallen him as a result, Wellstone
was killed in a plane crash in the run up to the 2002 Senate elections. The
death of the most vociferous Democratic critic of the then potential war
in Iraq, just as sabres were rattling ever louder, was seen by some as an
eerie
coincidence, suggesting that the Executive had made a closer study of the
history of Byzantium than might at first appear.
Monsanto were one of the suppliers of chemicals for the Vietnam War including
the notorious Agent Orange. Whilst Monsanto acknowledge, in the 130 countries
worldwide where they are marketed, that Roundup and Roundup Ultra should
be used with caution to avoid damage to humans, animals, and other flora,
it has
long been suspected there has not been adequate research into the possible
effects on humans of enhanced Roundup Ultra Cosmo Flux 411 F, which apparently
has been deployed by the US Government without the knowledge of the Colombian
Government. The US 'War on Drugs' has frightening implications
for the Colombian ecosystem, and if coca and poppy planting continue to move
into the areas where coffee is grown, the health effects of the spraying
could be felt globally. Within the USA, Monsanto's reassurances regarding
the
safety of their operations have been shown to be lamentably wanting: they
were recently found guilty by a court in Alabama of conduct 'so outrageous
in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of
decency
so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilised society'.
The case concerned the long-term poisoning and systematic cover-up of the
toxic pollution of the poor community of Anniston. The company was heavily
fined
as a result, but it is clear that, for this corporation at least, the wages
of sin substantially exceed the costs of virtue.
Appallingly, worse is yet to come. The US administration is contemplating
the use of mycoherbicides, genetically engineered pathogenic fungi, conjured
up
by the US Department of Agriculture's experiment station in Beltsville,
Maryland. These are being produced with US funds by Ag/Bio Company, at a
private lab in Bozeman, Montana, and at a former Soviet bioweapons factory
in Tashkent,
Uzbekistan. Fusarium oxysporum is designed for use against marijuana and
coca plants and Pleospora papaveracea is engineered to destroy opium poppies.
Neither
the human health implications of their use nor the likely effect on other
plant species has been determined. The Colombian rainforest is one of the
most biodiverse
remaining on the planet, and the inevitable spill-over of aerial-sprayed
mycoherbicides could trigger an ecological and human catastrophe that would
make Vietnam seem
like small change. The destruction of the forest plant life would be very
convenient for mining, logging, and oil interests, however. The Convention
on the Prohibition
of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques
(ENMOD) was adopted by the UN in 1976, with the US as a signatory, as a result
of the worldwide condemnation of the use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam
War. Peru and Ecuador oppose the US plan, citing not only ENMOD but also
the non-proliferation section of the Biological Warfare Convention, which
proscribes
the transfer between nations of such weapons. It is a telling comment on
Colombia's subservient colonial status that it is likely to be forced into
accepting a
provision within the 'Plan Colombia', shortly to be agreed by Congress,
whereby massive US aid and weaponry will be given to the Colombian Government
to wage war against the FARC guerillas ('Frerzas Armadas Revolucionares
de Colombia') only if the former agrees to the use of mycoherbicides.
The rural people, ecology, and coffee industry of Colombia are thus threatened
with devastation by their own government. The likely effect on the coffee crop
remains to be seen, but there is no reason to assume that the coffee fields
will be immune to the drifting herbicide sprays, or that this toxic soup may
not enter the food chain via the endless cup.
Coffee came to Colombia as a result of Spanish colonization. The foundation
of the cities of Santa Marta and Cartagena on the coast from the 1520s was
followed by inland cities, including Bogotá, from where the new state
was administered, absorbing the indigenous Indian tribes without much resistance.
Cartagena grew to be a major mercantile and naval port of the Spanish Empire
and was famously plundered by Sir Francis Drake. In time-honoured fashion,
disease and hard labour laid waste to the local Indians, and miscegenation
obliterated their culture: they were joined in their oppressed state by African
slaves, who worked the mines and fields. The FNC claims that coffee was introduced
by Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth century: this remains both unsubstantiated
and unlikely. Not only would this imply that the Jesuits knew about coffee
when it was but a twinkle in the eye of other European traders, but that they
had anticipated its value as an export crop. In general, the Spanish were slow
to develop the coffee-growing potential of their Empire, and it is more likely
that it was introduced in the late eighteenth century.
During the eighteenth century the Viceroyalty of New Granada was formed,
incorporating modern-day Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Ecuador. Spaniards
born in South
America started to occupy key positions in the administration and army, and,
whilst loyalty to Spain remained absolute, the seeds of independence were
sown. Napoleon's invasion of Spain triggered an identity crisis amongst that
Empire's subjects, facilitating the rise, during the early nineteenth
century, of Simón Bolívar, 'The Liberator', who secured
independence but at the cost of the secession of Venezuela and Ecuador. The
country then had a million and a half inhabitants. Liberal reforms during the
latter half of the century tended - as they did throughout Latin America - to
consolidate the position of the wealthy through land reforms. Indians found
themselves dispossessed of the little land that they had. The Conservatives
sought to reintroduce the ties with the Catholic Church that the Liberals had
broken, and bloody civil war was frequent. By the beginning of the twentieth
century, Colombia was producing some 3 per cent of the world's coffee;
twenty years later, it was 10 per cent, accounting for 70 per cent of the country's
export income. It principally went to the US. Panama seceded in 1903 after
the machinations of Philippe Jean Bunau-Varilla and Theodore Roosevelt over
the Panama Canal, which the Colombian Government did not wish to be built.
The Panamanians received annual payment from America in exchange for yielding
sovereignty in the Canal Zone. Colombia greatly resented this intrusion by
its powerful neighbour. The FNC was founded by 'cafeteros', coffee
farmers, in 1927, and remains a non-governmental organization, and still exhibits
unfashionable signs of democratic tendencies. Under President Lopez in the
1930s, laws were passed giving legal title to squatters of unused agricultural
land, a radical reform that had a significant impact on the coffee industry,
giving thousands of growers their own land. The return of the Conservatives
after the Second World War saw a time of political turbulence and the rise
of 'La Violencia' in which 200,000 people died in the period up
to 1964. A military coup in 1953 resulted in a populist President, General
Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, whose regime collapsed when world coffee prices fell
dramatically in 1957. The Liberals and Conservatives then formed a National
Front, in effect a power-sharing agreement amongst the élite, alternating
the presidency between them. It ensured that at least no one else got a look
in.
The 'Alliance for Progress', a US initiative for economic development
in the region started in 1961, had the predictable side effect of increasing
Colombia's dependence on the USA. Orlando Fals Borda, a former dean of
the faculty of sociology at the National University of Colombia, describes
the initiative thus: 'What we actually did was to mortgage the country
in order to save a ruling class that was headed for disaster. It was already
tottering when this stimulation came along to enable it to gasp out a few
more breaths, the same kind of artificial breathing as that of a dying man
who is
fed oxygen, and equally expensive. The sad part is that this ruling class
will not have to pay the mortgage it incurred. It will be paid, perhaps with
the
blood, certainly with the sweat of our children and the working classes,
the innocent people who always in the last analysis pay for the broken plates.'
Inflation, unemployment, and corruption gave rise to popular mistrust of
the National Front, and revolutionary Marxist movements emerged from the
universities
in the 1960s, including FARC. The latter remains the foremost revolutionary
force in Colombia today. The rise of the Medellín and Cali cartels in
the 1970s brought a new complication to the political scene: drugs. Colombia
was initially the main supplier of cannabis to the voracious US drug market,
and then subsequently cocaine. The return to some semblance of democratic choice
with the demise of the National Front and the re-emergence of the Liberals
and Conservatives was increasingly marred by the tendency of the drug cartels
to kill unco-operative judges and politicians. The Marxist insurgents were
pitted against the government-approved vigilante groups formed by landowners,
and they all received funding from the drugs trade. Into this maelstrom strode
the USA, providing massive aid to the Colombian military and assisting in every
way short of actual participation to combat leftist insurgency. The victims
were frequently simply political opponents - trade unionists, human rights
activists, and left-leaning politicians - rather than guerrillas stalking
the jungles. America justifies this under the banner of the 'War on Drugs',
which conveniently ignores the involvement of all parties - government,
paramilitaries, insurgents, and the CIA - in that same trade. The recently
elected Colombian President has promised to double the police and triple the
military in an all-out effort finally to deal with the guerrilla problem, with
promises of US support that includes satellite tracking technology to keep
tabs on rebel forces, whilst the coffee industry teeters on the verge of collapse
and pushes those who have been critically affected into the arms of those same
guerrillas. America's money is spent on copious military aid, divisive
and destructive, but the idea of using that money to support a minimum coffee
price, which would go some way to addressing the root cause of the problems,
remains heretical. The humble Colombian cafetero trying to turn a dime on a
coffee smallholding hardly registers on the global economic radar screen, but
it's his country, his land, and his compatriots that suffer.
The FNC is by no means a perfect institution: in a dysfunctional democracy,
in which coffee was by far the largest earner of foreign exchange, it could
never be. The oligarchy was deeply involved in coffee, and the FNC to some
became the means of reinforcing the patron/peon status quo. What it managed
to ensure from its foundation in 1927 was a consistently high quality of
coffee: this is no longer the case. The FNC has been forced by the crisis
in world
coffee prices to lay off over half its employees, cut back its representative
offices worldwide, and reconsider its role. The fund for growers, accumulated
in good times to cover the bad, is exhausted, and it is only by running a
deficit that the organization can help growers with a paltry subsidy. They
in turn
cannot manage to produce and process coffee to the same high standard that
had become a sine qua non in the coffee trade. The quality coffee that blenders
and roasters could rely on has been compromised, perhaps fatally.
It is easy to forget, when reviewing the problems of Central and South America
in relation to their northern neighbour, that a large proportion of the population
of those countries descend from the Spanish colonists who killed (deliberately,
by war, or accidentally, by disease), brutalized, or economically marginalized
the indigenes they found there, and then introduced negro slaves to work
the land for them. The prints of the bloody hands of empire builders of European
stock can be found over much of the world today, and whilst the fortunes
of
individual nation states may have waxed and waned, the European gene-pool
still has a pretty firm grip on the totality of the world's wealth.
As the western hemisphere produces two-thirds of the world's coffee and
is dominated by the USA, which buys three-quarters of its needs from its
neighbours, it is possible to fall into the trap of blaming that country
for the problems
besetting the coffee industry. This is also the result of the understandable
instinct to blame the top dog when one isn't the top dog oneself, or,
as is more frequently the case with European powers, one has ceased to be
top dog some time ago. After all, the historical record shows at various
times
that Portugal, Spain, France, England, Germany, Holland, Russia, and even
Belgium held substantial colonial interests, in some cases empires. The coffees
of
the world were mainly produced there for the delectation and delight of their
various home markets, and, as we have seen, there is little to suggest, in
the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth at least, that the Dutch
in Indonesia, the Portuguese in Brazil, or the British in Jamaica were running
anything other than colonial regimes that would today be totally unacceptable.
The reality is that the overt nation-state colonialism of the earlier eras
has now morphed into a new transnational corporate colonialism in which all
the Western nations have a stake, and in which the dominant force is the
USA.
In the twentieth century, issues of social justice seemed to play a meaningful
part in the political agenda of nation states. With the demise of the Soviet
Union there are, at a national level, few remaining exemplars, however flawed,
of societies in which social justice is a governing principle. The removal
of the perceived 'threat' of such societies
in Central America led directly to the dropping by the US of
its support for the International Coffee Agreement and the ensuing free trade
free-for-all that has brought coffee farming to its knees worldwide. Coffee
consumers in Western countries may have 'benefited' from lower
prices, although often at the cost of lower quality: national and inter-national
coffee companies, in the meantime, have benefited from substantially increased
profitability. This is the fundamental aim of transnational corporate colonialism.
Chapter 18
The Heart of Darkness
[Coffee is] 'slow poison'
voltaire
Vietnam
In the 1980s Vietnam was the 42nd ranked producer of coffee in the world, largely
Robusta of a fair quality grown on what had been former French colonial plantations
nationalized by the new government. The 67,000 bags it exported scarcely registered
a blip on the radar of the world coffee trade.
In 2001 Vietnam produced some 15 million bags, making it the second largest
producer of coffee worlwide. This massive increase has been blamed for the
global collapse of coffee prices. The World Bank, which strenuously denies
any miscalculation, is in turn widely criticized for financing the vast expansion
of coffee growing. In the meantime there are unsubstantiated but persistent
rumours concerning possible dioxin contamination of the coffee crop, a legacy
of the widespread spraying of Agent Orange by the Americans during the Vietnam
War. Vietnam is the country where coffee's dark history has come home
to roost with a vengance.
The colonization of Vietnam started with the fall of Saigon to French forces
in 1859. The attack was a manifestation of the aggressive capitalism of French
imperial strategy under Napoleon III. No self-respecting European nation could
eschew the colonial action in Asia, and
the French were no exception. Within a few years they had control of what they
renamed Cochinchina, and by 1887 had amalgamated modern-day Vietnam, Laos,
and Cambodia under the general heading of the Indochinese Union. The installation
of the colonial fixtures and fittings (roads, railways, canals, ports, and
French administration) was achieved in short order, and the French sat back
to enjoy the wealth of natural resources and agricultural products that Indochina
brought forth - minerals, coal, rice, and rubber. Coffee was not amongst
them: although it was introduced in 1887, it would appear that the coffee grown
there during the French era was for local consumption only. The region also
provided a substantial market for French manufactures. There was little encouragement
of economic growth, as French investors wanted quick returns, and profits were
rarely reinvested.
Lands opened up by irrigation for rice cultivation were appropriated by the
French or their Vietnamese sidekicks: although rice production quadrupled between
1880 and 1930, the average amount consumed by the peasants actually decreased.
In an echo of the privations witnessed by Multatuli in Max Havelaar, landless
peasants were forced to work for no salary to pay in kind for the taxes imposed
by the French to finance the infrastructure projects from which they derived
no benefit. There was little education, justice, or health care for the general
population to compensate for the colonial yoke, and the Vietnamese were excluded
from bettering themselves
by participation in the new economy. In short, the traditional charges laid
against European colonial powers find ample justification in the French treatment
of Vietnam.
Under such circumstances it is not surprising that
nationalist movements sprang up, and were suppressed,
with some frequency. None of these endured until
the
foundation of the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930 by Ho Chi Minh, who as
a seaman had travelled extensively during his youth before settling in Paris
and joining the French Communist Party there, subsequently returning to Vietnam.
After several ruthlessly crushed false starts, the Party had made some headway
when the Second World War broke out and the whole of Indochina became a French-administered
Japanese territory. In an oriental echo of Vichy France, the French collaborated
with the Japanese, allowing them to station troops in Indochina and use it
as the launch pad for their extensions by force of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity
Sphere. Only the Communist Party, led by Ho Chi Minh, assisted the allied war
effort during the Second World War by undercover intelligence operations against
the French and their Japanese overlords. In the power vacuum created by the
Japanese defeat in 1945, Ho Chi Minh was able to seize de facto power of the
north of the country, whilst the French held on to the south. In this division
lay the origins of the Vietnam War.
The US President, Roosevelt, in wartime negotiations with Winston Churchill,
had insisted that Britain should divest itself of its Empire. This was couched
in the language of a moral imperative, but was also clearly aimed at creating
new markets for American goods. There was also no particular threat of a Communist
takeover in the colonies that he proposed Britain must vacate, although later
Malaya was to prove the exception. The French were not expected to release
their colonial grip on Indochina, however, because it was clear that, if they
did so, Ho Chi Minh would take over, and because he was a Communist he was
therefore not eligible for assistance in throwing off the colonial mantle.
Far from it: he was the potential domino that could set in train the eponymous
effect, and that was a sufficient casus belli as far as the US was concerned.
France thus enjoyed America's support in the form of aid and equipment
in what turned, after a period of uneasy co-existence, into the First Indochina
War. The result of this was a formal division of the country, leaving the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam in the North. Ho Chi Minh was a fully Westernized, modernizing
ruler of the fledgling state, who professed an admiration for America and incorporated
elements of that country's constitution into his. The South fell prey
to a totalitarian regime that relied heavily on the threat of the North to
woo the favours of America. The pattern that played havoc in post-war Central
America was present in Indochina, too, although coffee was not the driving
economic force. Inevitably the ruthless suppression of dissent in South Vietnam
fuelled the incipient support for the politics of the North, and aid and insurgents
began to flow south, seeking reunification of the country. A military coup
on 1 November 1963, authorized by President Kennedy, saw the assassination
of President Ngo Dinh Diem and installed a succession of corrupt and incompetent
generals in power, increasingly maintained there by American aid and military
equipment. As long as this was used to counter the Communist threat, a blind
eye was turned to the internal affairs. Seventeen thousand American 'military
advisors' were stationed in the South by the end of 1963, propping up
a regime that was under external pressure from insurgents and internal pressure
from the popular National Liberation Front.
President Lyndon Johnson initiated the bombing of North Vietnam in 1965, in
which year 75,000 American troops were stationed in the south. By early 1968
this number had reached half a million, sparking a wave of internal dissent
in the USA that changed the strategic landscape
for decades. Johnson, recognizing his inability to sustain this position, proposed
peace talks, to be held in Paris in May. It was an election year, and it has
become clear recently that these talks were sabotaged by the Republican candidate,
Richard Nixon, who promised the South Vietnamese that they would get a better
deal if he were elected. He was, and they didn't: the war dragged on
for another three years, resulting in the loss of another 30,000 American lives
and countless hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. During the period up to
their final ignominious withdrawal in 1973 the US hit Vietnam with more bombs
than were dropped during the entire Second World War, the equivalent of a 500-lb
bomb for every man, woman, and child. Each of the 2 million Vietnamese who
died was killed at a cost of $50,000, making it a very expensive pointless
war to boot.
The defeat in the Vietnam War haunts the American psyche in the way that no
other of the interventions that have served to create the American Empire does.
However, it has been argued that the defeat was in fact no such thing, and
that the prime strategic aim of ensuring that Vietnam would not be able to
demonstrate the viability of an alternative political system was achieved.
Vietnam was so ruined by the war that it has been treated until recently as
an economic basket case. The bombs ensured that Communism equals chaos.
The war haunts more than just the American psyche: the health of many veterans
has been seriously jeopardized by their contact with Agent Orange. The American
military were determined to prevent Viet Cong insurgency into South Vietnam,
and believed that the lush jungle and mangrove forests gave the fighters cover.
It was but a short imaginative step to decide that if the cover was eliminated,
then the insurgents would be eliminated with it. Thus Operation Ranch Hand,
the folksy name for the comprehensive chemical defoliation of South Vietnam
between 1961 and 1973, was born. The issues that this strategy raised have
never been addressed fully. Since Agent Orange was sprayed indiscriminately
on jungle and farmland alike, in full knowledge that it would cause civilian
suffering, was the spraying not a breach of the chemical weapons convention,
even if its effect on the civilian population was not direct - i.e. if
it deprived them of their livelihoods, not their health? Subsequent compelling
evidence suggests that Agent Orange posed a direct and immediate threat to
human health, but the question is whether, even without that knowledge, the
use of the chemical was illegal. The relevance of this question in our times
cannot be ignored: with war having been waged against Iraq partly on the grounds
that it has historically deployed chemical weapons, and the continued use by
the US of such methods in the so-called 'War on Drugs' in Colombia
(ironically, again involving the world's favourite chemical company,
Monsanto), the notion that the US deliberately deployed chemical weapons, and
continues to do so, is not merely of academic interest.
Agent Orange, so called because its barrels were marked with an orange stripe,
was manufactured by a number of companies - Dow, Diamond Shamrock, and
Monsanto. It was a mixture of two herbicides, dichlorophenoxyacetic acid and
trichlorophenoxyacetic acid. It has long been alleged that in the manufacturing
process of Agent Orange a contaminant, TCDD, a type of dioxin, became concentrated
to dangerously high levels, but this has never been accepted by Monsanto and
others involved in its manufacture. Dioxins are the unintentional by-product
of many other industrial processes involving chlorine such as waste incineration,
chemical manufacturing, and pulp and paper bleaching. In the early 1980s the
coffee industry was thrown into disarray when it was revealed that the chlorine
bleaching process used for the production of coffee filters might lead to dioxin
contamination. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part
of the World Health Organization, has considered since 1997 that the most potent
dioxin, 2, 3, 7, 8-TCDD, is a Class 1 carcinogen, meaning a 'known human
carcinogen'. Exposure to dioxin can also cause severe reproductive and
developmental problems (at levels a hundred times lower than those associated
with its cancer-causing effects) and immune system damage, and it can interfere
with regulatory hormones. It is also remarkably persistent, breaking down very
slowly in the environment and contaminating the entire food chain. Being fat
soluble, it bio-accumulates, leading to very high levels in mammals such as
fish, fowl, and cattle. Ducks, a favourite of the Vietnamese diet, are susceptible
to the bio-accumulation of dioxins.
Monsanto went to great lengths to challenge the veracity of the scientific
evidence proving the toxicity of dioxin. A class action brought against seven
companies, including Monsanto, in respect of Agent Orange, was settled for
a reported $180 million with the companies involved denying that Agent Orange
was responsible for the health complaints that had been alleged to be connected
with its use. The USA has a number of organizations dedicated to the dissemination
of information about Agent Orange, offering also practical and financial assistance
in those cases where a direct link can be shown between exposure to Agent Orange
and the specific illness. By the terms of the settlement with the chemical
companies, veterans can receive between $2,000 and $5,000 a month in compensation
(the Vietnamese Government, by contrast, pays its damaged veterans $7 a month).
However, the US military authorities still seek to suppress information concerning
the number of veterans involved and, most importantly of all, deny that Agent
Orange has caused or continues to cause any health problems whatsoever for
the Vietnamese in Vietnam. The subject is taboo in any diplomatic negotiations
between the two countries aimed at normalizing trade relations: initial talks
in the late 1980s were predicated on the sure knowledge that if the subject
of Agent Orange were raised, the Americans would walk out. The Vietnamese,
having been
ravaged mercilessly during the war, now find themselves in the position of
having to enter into a conspiracy of silence with their former persecutor in
order to restore some semblance of economic order. Agent Orange is now as much
a taboo subject for the Vietnamese as it is for the Americans. The reasons
are easy to see, and have been hinted
at widely in the press: with the country desperately trying to rebuild its
economy, it is heavily reliant on the sales of agricultural produce and shellfish
to the world. If there were any evidence of dioxin contamination of these exports,
the country would be very hard hit again.
An estimated 5,700 tonnes, or 12 million gallons, of Agent Orange were sprayed
on South Vietnam during the war, destroying as much as 14 per cent of the forest
cover and 50 per cent of the mangrove swamp that had previously been a valuable
source of lumber. Over 4.5 million acres of vegetation were wiped out, with
devastating results for the wildlife and ecology, let alone any unfortunate
Vietnamese who found themselves in the flight path of the sprayers. Inevitably
farms and smallholdings were also sprayed, causing widespread poverty and starvation.
It was ten years before crops could again be grown on land sprayed with Agent
Orange. The health costs are still not fully understood, but some 400,000 deaths
and serious cases of illness, and a further 500,000 birth defects in Vietnam
have been attributed to the agent by the one in-depth study that has so far
been conducted, by the Canadian Hatfield Consultancy Ltd. Dioxin enters the
food chain through contaminated soil or water supplies, and the build-up in
human tissue - revealed in one of the few 'hot spots' where it
has been properly monitored - is rising, which suggests that the problem
is increasing rather than fading away. It is one of the many vicious features
of dioxin that it breaks down remarkably slowly.
Given that the problem is quietly recognized, it is not surprising that the
coffee industry, which has traditionally prided itself on its scientific prowess,
has examined the issue of possible dioxin residues in the same Vietnamese coffee
that has flooded the world markets since the late 1990s. The industry was paralysed,
albeit briefly, in the mid 1980s by the sudden scare involving chlorine-bleached
coffee filter papers and possible dioxin residues therein. Dioxin has thus
negatively impinged on coffee consciousness before, and it would be natural
for industry professionals to have a once-bitten-twice-shy level of paranoia
on this issue. Indeed paranoia seems to be the order of the day, for information
on the subject is very hard to gather. This is curious, because all the evidence
would suggest that, since dioxin is not water soluble, it cannot be taken up
by plants, including coffee.
Nonetheless, the coffee trade is very nervous
about the subject. The PEC group of coffee scientists looked at the issue in
2002 and reported that no problems had been found. Or rather they are rumoured
to have reported this conclusion, because 'once it was established that
there was no cause for concern they didn't go public'. The report
was unreported. This guardedness may be in turn a result of the persistent
scaremongering in the USA, where apparently - according to the National
Coffee Association of America - a group of people the NCAA are unwilling
to name have for unknown reasons been regularly feeding the dioxin in coffee
story to the press. At one stage they even managed to start an entirely false
rumour that the FDA had placed an embargo on Vietnamese coffee. Whatever the
motives of this mysterious group, one thing is certain: if there were one sure
way to cure the current problems afflicting coffee producers, it would be for
the entire production of Vietnamese coffee to be taken off the market. There
would be an immediate and dramatic rise in world coffee prices. There is thus
an intriguing suggestion of commercial terrorism in the existence of these
shadowy figures: could it be that a coffee-producing country devastated by
low prices is making a desperate attempt to influence the market? Or is some
rogue syndicate seeking to make a quick killing on the New York 'C' market?
Given the lessons that could have been learnt from the Agent Orange débâcle,
the cavalier way in which the US Government repeats the errors of the past
beggars belief. As we have seen, in Colombia the 'War on Drugs' has led to
the increasing use of herbicides, raising similar environmental and public
health issues to those
concerning Agent Orange. This carries on despite the vociferous opposition
of many scientists and advocacy groups in the US, who charge that State Department
reports made to Congress, which must be submitted by law before funding can
be allocated, have been partial and inconclusive, and that the required reassurances
that 'chemicals used in the aerial eradication of coca crops in Colombia
do not pose unreasonable health or safety risks to humans or the environment'
cannot be derived from the material presented in the reports. The inevitable
conclusion
must be that perceived geopolitical imperatives override all other concerns,
and that in any case it will be the poor farmers of Colombia who will bear
the brunt of any side effects. There are hints that contamination with Round-Up,
the herbicide most widely used, may affect the coffee crop, in which case the
State Department may in future be able to congratulate itself on having introduced
poison from Latin America to its own citizens.
The way that other depressing historical patterns repeat themselves in the
coffee industry is interesting. The botanical nature of coffee favours highland
production: highlands in the tropics tend to be the last refuge of the virgin
ecology, in the form of forest cover, wildlife, and indigenous peoples. Thus
whenever coffee cultivation is increased, it tends to be at the expense of
all three. Certainly the ethnic Cambodians, who until recently inhabited the
areas of the central highlands of Vietnam where coffee production is being
expanded, complain not only of being driven from their lands but also of being
swamped by Vietnamese from the Red River and Mekong deltas who have been encouraged
to move there. This is seen in some circles as a cynical political ploy to
get them to leave for the areas nearer the Cambodian border where they would
act as a 'security seal' against possible incursions from that
country. As we have seen in Central America, the purging of indigenous Indians
from their highland refuges is closely allied to the fortunes of the coffee
industry, and it would seem that the Vietnamese are following in this lamentable
tradition.
The enormous expansion of coffee production in Vietnam has been widely attributed
to the World Bank, which has been at considerable pains to deny any involvement,
producing fiercely worded press releases exonerating itself from any blame.
As with Agent Orange, the veil
of official secrecy is hard to tear aside, as the financial institutions as
well as the Vietnamese Government itself are unwilling to shoulder the responsibility
of having contributed substantially to the collapse in world coffee prices.
If there had been a material improvement in the lot of the small coffee farmers
to whom money was lent (by the government, with or without the cognizance of
the World Bank) in order to plant coffee, that would be some consolation. However,
as a result of their own 'success', these same farmers are currently
being forced to sell their coffee at about 60 per cent of the cost of production,
and are locked into having to repay loans taken out on the basis of wildly
optimistic forecasts for potential revenues from coffee farming. Vietnamese
coffee production, having boomed, is now falling rapidly as it is realized
that the promised riches are chimerical. The larger cost, to the fragile highland
environment, to its beleaguered wildlife, to the displaced indigenes, and to
the migrant lowlanders left stranded without an income and deep in debt, is
incalculable. It is not surprising that there is no one willing to take the
blame.
Vietnam was the focus of well-meant development plans, of which coffee was
a prominent feature, intended to pull it out of the chaos and devastation caused
by the long war with America. Its chief asset, low labour costs, was a direct
inheritance of that war. By deploying the promise of its cheap labour and factoring
it into its projections, the government was able to attract development capital
from institutions such as the World Bank, who foresaw a realistic route for
the country into the global trading community. This is colonialism in our era:
the exploitation of cheap labour by the deployment of capital from wealthy
lenders for the benefit of First World consumers. The World Bank is of course
controlled by its 51 per cent shareholder, the US Treasury. Along with the
IMF and the WTO it is part of the unelected triumvirate of the Washington Consensus
whose decisions affect the lives of millions. All three are ideologically motivated,
infatuated with the American
model of free market capitalism and the purported benefits it can bring. That
the World Bank failed to act responsibly in the case of Vietnam and its coffee,
bringing untold misery to millions around the globe, should come as no surprise
to those who have followed the path it has charted over the last decade or
so. The defection of its former chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz, who was ejected
in 1999 for daring to suggest the Bank should soften its approach, provides
the reassuring insight that everything that its worst enemies have said about
the World Bank appears to be true: the one-size-fits-all economic prescriptions
for countries seeking loans; the bribes to government ministers in return for
the knock-down sale of public assets to Western corporate interests; the opening
up of the financial markets to foreign investors that leads to runs on the
local bank when confidence wavers; the anticipation of social unrest requiring
strong measures to suppress it; the bailing out of local banks when their loans
from Western banks are at risk; the constant reiteration of the free trade
mantra despite the continuation of agricultural subsidies in the First World
. . . The list is unrelenting. Stiglitz, an outspoken critic of the IMF, compares
that organization's approach to a country's economic problems to
high-altitude bombing: 'From one's luxury hotel, one can
callously impose policies about which one would think twice if one knew the
people whose lives one was destroying.' The bombing analogy is an apt
expression of the way in which the wielders of power in global politics and
economics are increasingly removed from the consequences of their actions.
The deliberate killing of civilians - a war crime in any other context - has,
by the curious circumlocutions of power politics, come to be regarded as unfortunate
but wholly legitimate collateral damage resulting from aerial bombardment of
strategic targets. Similarly, in the operations of the global economy, the
wholesale destruction of lives and livelihoods of entire nations wrought by
the financial institutions in pursuit of an ideology is not generally seen
for the horror it is, but as the slightly misguided but fundamentally well-meant
application of sound principles.
The reverberations in the coffee industry of these economic policies are manifold.
Many coffee-producing countries used to have coffee marketing boards who bought
up all the farmers' produce. Although these were frequently corrupt and
overly bureaucratic, at least the farmers knew that they would sell their coffee,
and that they would get paid. The structural adjustment programmes imposed
by the IMF/World Bank in the 1980s and 1990s led to the abolition of many of
these boards, allowing the market to be opened up to private traders. As these
are frequently the transnationals that dominate the trade, the farmer rarely
has much choice regarding whom to sell to and at what price, and there is no
guarantee that they will come back for more. The effect has been shattering.
Coffee used to be a business in which, despite its manifest drawbacks, a man
could think himself honourably employed. In common with many other businessmen,
the coffee man as often as not now finds himself effectively a receiver of
stolen goods and an enslaver of the Third World. The more conscientious may
scratch their heads and wonder how on earth this came about. Most keep their
conscience prisoner.
Number One World Trade Center, across from the building containing the Coffee
Futures Exchange, used to house a restaurant on the top floor called 'Windows
on the World', which commanded spectacular views over Manhattan and beyond.
It was possible for the historian to peer down from these Olympian heights
and hazard an informed guess as to where the fortifications stood on the Brooklyn
Heights across the East River, to which George Washington withdrew his shattered
army after the battle against the more numerous British troops on Long Island
on 27 August 1776. A few days later 'Nine thousand (or more) disheartened
soldiers, the last hope of their country, were penned up, with the sea behind
them and a triumphant enemy in front . . .' From above, the ultimate
armchair historian could sip Chablis and imagine how Washington had somehow
arranged an orderly retreat back to Manhattan avoiding the English frigates,
a miniature Dunkirk that not only saved the nation, but paved the way for the
growth of American pre-eminence.
Now the restaurant, the Twin Towers, and our comforting illusion of historical
perspective have collapsed like a telescope. Then, if you like, is now. The
edifice of our modern Western cultural tradition, which allowed us to treat
the past as something from which our own human narrative was somehow exempt,
has been demolished. The stuff of history, that was supposed to have been consigned
to history - empire, slavery, religious wars, oppression, famine and
pestilence - is played out before our disbelieving eyes, and we can no
longer patronize our past. 'We' now stand revealed as no better
than 'they' were then: only the scale of the drama has changed.
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