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

(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

(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.