Black Gold

One thing is sure: if there is anything this Kopi Luwak fiasco has amply demonstrated, it is that if there is any room for fraudulent and deceitful practice in the trade, there will be.

How might a watertight certification work? I’ve met one source of genuine wild kopi luwak who has convinced me that his product is bona fide precisely because of the protocols that he has in place to ensure there is no forgery or adulteration. These include strict observation of the freshness and dietary mixture of the luwak’s scats, strict quotas (maximum sustainable production ceiling) and significant financial incentives – if you, as a smallholder, are accepted as a supplier, you’ll have long-term rewards that you’ll lose immediately and irrevocably if you attempt to cheat. And cheating may eventually become easy to prove: a Japanese scientist is currently working on a method to distinguish between wild and caged kopi luwak, which would give the certification of this product a solid foundation.

It’s interesting not only to see how modern methods can be used to tackle such animal welfare issues, but also how the same issues can have unexpected resonances with the past. One aspect of certification has an uncanny echo of the learned debates about coffee itself in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Islamic courts of Mecca and Cairo that we’ll encounter later in this book. As befits the government of the world’s largest Muslim population, when they felt that they were ready to ramp up the production of caged civet coffee through the creation of a civet-breeding programme, in 2010 the plantations in East Java applied to the Indonesian Ulema Council of Islamic clerics for a fatwa (juridical opinion) to determine whether kopi luwak was halal or haram (forbidden). In the final fatwa, it was declared that as long as certain production protocols were met (none of which mentioned the provenance of the coffee, as we’ve seen), it was judged halal, presumably to some relief.

It’s been a long road since my initial impulse purchase in Yorkshire back in 1991, and the end is not yet in sight, but consciousness about kopi luwak has certainly been raised, and that can only be for the good – eventually. In the meantime, this coffee has acquired a new name in academic circles: apparently, it’s an ‘excremental commodity’. So at least it can now be talked about without embarrassment at polite dinner parties.

A month or two ago I met an Australian coffee planter in Sri Lanka who has a hundred hectares under cultivation, high in the central mountains adjoining a forest. I told him about my involvement with kopi luwak. ‘Luwaks?’ he said, ‘Got hundreds of those little blighters running around my plantation. My guys have gathered up 40 kilos of their droppings. Dunno what to do with them!’

‘Do nothing,’ I advised him. ‘The game ain’t worth the candle.’

NOTE ON THIS NEW EDITION:

The opening chapter of this book concerns the deep coffee crisis of the early noughties. While this dire phase has thankfully passed, the wider observations made remain relevant today, and there is nothing to prevent such a crisis arising again, as indeed appears to be happening right at this moment, in a less severe incarnation. I therefore have not attempted to update the statistics I used previously to reflect current market conditions.

1 (#ulink_b9192ddd-9d79-5835-8c83-029ca6bfb0ef)

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW (#ulink_b9192ddd-9d79-5835-8c83-029ca6bfb0ef)

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 newspaper 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 foreclosures 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 transnational 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 producers 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 neocolonialism. 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 masterminded 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.

2 (#ulink_ad4723c7-85c7-51eb-9553-147f2107766d)

ORIGINS (#ulink_ad4723c7-85c7-51eb-9553-147f2107766d)

All theory is grey. Green is the golden tree of life.

GOETHE

Although it is enjoyed daily by a good proportion of the world’s population, very little is generally known about the origins of coffee. There are a number of myths that are ritually aired by the coffee trade to keep the curious at bay, but nothing in the way of substantiated fact is usually presented to the public. To build a satisfactory picture of what happened in the time before coffee bursts upon the historical stage in the sixteenth century requires piecing together disparate elements of anthropology, archaeology, and even theology. Indeed, the search for coffee’s roots takes us back to the roots of man himself.

In 1974, at Hadar in the Afar desert of northern Ethiopia, palaeontologists unearthed the fossil remains of a group of Australopithecus afarensis, mankind’s oldest known ancestor. Despite earlier discoveries of Java Man, Peking Man and others, it seems that Ethiopia is mankind’s original location; genetic research suggests that all modern humans are directly descended from a group of about a hundred and fifty Homo sapiens sapiens who lived in the Ethiopian Highlands some 120,000 years ago. Even the Holy Grail of anthropology, the so-called Missing Link, may well have been found there, for the recent discovery of a fossilized toe of Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba offers the first tentative evidence of the species’ separation from the chimpanzee some six million years ago. Despite its highland forest environment, Ardipethecus ramidus kadabba appears to have walked upright. Previously it had been conjectured that man’s need to stand upright was forced upon him by the evolutionary process to enable him to peer over the high grass of the plains in pursuit of prey. The fact that he appears to have stood upright whilst still confined to the forest has fatally undermined this theory.

One of the other abiding mysteries of anthropology is the so-called brain explosion that probably took place about 500,000 years ago, the result of which was that man’s brain size increased by 30 per cent, principally in the cerebrum, the upper brain where most conscious thinking purportedly takes place. Various theories have been put forward for this, but the development of language would seem to provide the most credible explanation, as language requires a great deal of thought and in turn generates a great deal to think about. Its arrival put mankind in a position, at least in part, to determine the course of his own evolution, allowing him to develop and communicate concepts that had been hitherto literally unthinkable, and to begin to adapt his environment to his needs. It is tempting to wonder whether the proliferation of wild coffee trees in the same Ethiopian highland forests could also have had a hand in the process. Coffee has always been associated with speed of cognition and expression, and the sudden dawn of self-awareness in the Genesis story concerning the forbidden fruit of the ‘Tree of Knowledge’ is something that could have been prompted by a psychoactive substance such as caffeine. Such awareness (or, perhaps, gnosis) is also an attribute of language and thought, without which it is quiescent. To place the bright red coffee cherry centre stage in the story of the Fall is altogether a more inspired piece of casting than the choice of a lowly Golden Delicious; imagine coffee berries driving their eaters into a caffeine-fuelled frenzy of quick-fire contention and ingenious thinking, engines of brain evolution. The previously docile brains of Homo sapiens sapiens would have been ill prepared for such an assault. Likewise the Ethiopian Highlands, with their sumptuous vegetation and spectacular scenery, are a properly marvellous setting for the mythical Garden of Eden. Even today the wild coffee trees grow under the forest canopy on the escarpments of the Rift Valley, their white flowers heavy with a scent close to that of jasmine. The coffee cherries, the stones of which make two coffee beans, ripen in clusters as they grow from green through gold to a rich red colour, which stands out in bold contrast to the smooth, luscious dark green leaves of the tree. They were doubtless suitably tempting to our early ancestors. The description of the Tree of Knowledge contained in the rediscovered Old Testament Book of Enoch could easily suggest the coffee tree, with its depiction of delicious fragrance and clusters of fruit – and that previously missing book, supposedly suppressed because of its salacious content, was unearthed by the eighteenth-century explorer James Bruce in, strange to say, Ethiopia.

At this point it would seem appropriate to introduce this native of Ethiopia, the species Coffea arabica of the sub-genus Eucoffea of the genus Coffea of the family Rubiaceae of the order Rubiales of the sub-class Sympetalae of the class Dicotyledonae of the sub-kingdom Angiospermae from the kingdom of Vegetables. Left to its own devices the Arabica coffee plant can grow up to twenty feet high; its lush, dark-green, ovoid leaves are about six inches long, and it produces small white flowers with the characteristic heady jasmine-like fragrance. The coffee tree usually flowers once in a season, but in some countries where it has been transplanted from its homeland, such as Colombia, it may blossom and produce cherries at various stages of ripeness throughout the year. The flowers are pollinated by insects and the wind, and go on to form ‘drupes’, which are infant coffee berries, and which grow over a period of six months to form bunches of cherries that in many respects resemble the bright red domestic eating cherry.

As perhaps was the case with our putative Adam and Eve, ripe coffee cherries are a tempting proposition to some animals and birds, giving rise to some esoteric practices. Kopi luak is a fine Sumatran coffee, much valued in Japan, made from beans gathered from the dung of Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, the common palm civet, which skulks around the plantations at night selecting only the finest, ripest cherries. The beast digests the skin and the pulp of the cherry, the mucillage and the parchment surrounding the bean, and even the final obstacle, the thin ‘silverskin’. In so doing it achieves exactly what modern ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ processing technology seeks to emulate – that is, the complete separation of the core coffee bean from all its protective layers. The civet cannot digest the hard beans, however, and they pass through its system: they are picked out of the civet’s dung because the flavour imparted by the digestive process is highly prized once the beans are cleaned and roasted. Indian monkeys, parrots, and mongooses are also supposed to subscribe to this recondite method of coffee processing, and their coffee byproducts likewise are said to attract local enthusiasts. Not all such coffees pass entirely through an animal’s system: the spread of coffee cultivation in the Spanish Philippine Islands in the nineteenth century was evidently greatly assisted by Pardasciurus musanga, a small mammal which ate the flesh of the cherries but spat out the bean, which was then ready for germination.

Insects, however, find their enjoyment of the coffee cherry considerably lessened by its caffeine content. While the leaves and flowers of a coffee plant contain slightly less than 1 per cent caffeine by dry weight, the pulp of the cherry contains a little more, and the bean itself around 3 per cent. Nature has so ordered things that the highest levels of caffeine are to be found in the most important part of the plant, its seed. This is because caffeine is nothing more than a natural insecticide, and the high caffeine levels protect the seed from unwanted attention. Hapless insects who ingest too much find that their nervous systems go into overdrive. By the miracle of international trade, the same symptoms can be observed in office workers the world over.

The other species of coffee grown commercially around the world is C. canephora, the best-known variety of which is Robusta. The plant was first spotted by explorers in Uganda in 1862, where it was then used by the native Buganda tribe in a blood-brother ceremony. However, it was not until its rediscovery in the Belgian Congo in 1898 that it was thought worth cultivating. This was after outbreaks of hemileia vastatrix or ‘coffee rust’ had devastated the Arabica coffee plantations of Ceylon and the Dutch East Indies. Robusta coffee is, as the name implies, more robust than its Arabica cousin. It grows at lower altitude (and contains as much as double the amount of caffeine, perhaps in order to deal with the more persistent insects of the tropical lowlands), it tastes coarse and rubbery, and has very little to recommend it other than resistance to disease, which is in itself a recommendation only to planters. It was initially banned from the New York Coffee Exchange as a ‘practically worthless bean’. Being considerably cheaper than Arabica, it can be found in all sorts of less salubrious locations: instant coffee, cheap blends, vending machine coffee and the like. Its harsh flavour and heavy caffeine kick are easily identified. Introduced only a century ago, with the sudden rise to prominence of Vietnam (see chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)), it threatens to become a major force in the market, replacing the subtle refined flavours and aromas of Arabica coffee with its pestilential presence. It has some uses in espresso blending, but otherwise it is Arabica coffee’s crude, boorish, sour, uncivilized, black-hearted cousin, and true coffee aficionados rightly give it a very wide berth. No coffee-taster worth his or her salt would seek to maintain that a Robusta coffee was better in flavour terms than all but the worst-produced Arabica: its only merit is its price. Nonetheless, nearly half of the coffee sold in the UK is Robusta, and even in Italy, a country which celebrates its coffee culture like no other, a third of the coffee drunk is Robusta, whilst nearly a quarter of the coffee drunk in the USA is Robusta. The country that has thus far remained most immune to its pernicious influence is Norway, where it is still virtually unknown. Of global coffee consumption today, one-third is of a low-quality coffee variety that scarcely existed a century ago, and the proportion is growing. We are witnessing the triumph of the ‘practically worthless bean’ in our coffee cups. At the same time, ironically, with prices at their current levels of 35 cents per pound, Robusta coffee is even more practically worthless than its Arabica cousin.

Despite its widespread use, this black sheep in the coffee family receives an almost total informational blackout when coffee companies come to describe their wares. There are no illustrated pamphlets extolling the virtues of Togolese Robustas over those of Uganda, no analyses of the typical flavour characteristics of the Cameroon variety. Whereas many companies might draw attention to the fact that their blends are ‘100 per cent Arabica’, few would proudly point out that they use 50 per cent Robusta. This is simply because all coffee professionals know that Robusta coffee is a cheaper, inferior type and are unwilling to admit that they have any association with it. Arguably, if consumers really understood the extent to which their coffee has become tainted by this parvenu coffee bean, they would turn away in droves. Even so the creeping infiltration of cheap Robustas into mainstream blends is noticeable. What might once have been a reasonable coffee from a vending machine has changed over the last few years into an unpalatable, caffeine-kicking monstrosity. It seems, however, that many consumers are largely unaware of the change, although there is some evidence to suggest that the additional caffeine content of coffee with a higher proportion of Robusta is leading to a drop in consumption.

If proto-humans had experienced Arabica coffee in their highland fastness it would have been in its raw form, whereas today it is used almost exclusively after roasting – so much so that most people outside the coffee trade would be hard pressed to say what a green (raw) coffee bean looks like. The almost miraculous, quasi-alchemical transformation of coffee in the roasting process can be created easily enough in the home: all that is required is a large handful of unroasted green coffee beans and a large cast-iron frying pan preheated (but not oiled) on a hot ring. Stirred constantly with a wooden spatula, within minutes the beans acquire a golden hue. Occasionally, sputterings of complaint can be heard, an odd explosion like that of corn popping, caused by steam expanding within the cell structure of the bean. The heat starts to transform the unpromising, torpid vegetable matter into that wonderful substance, roasted coffee. Some smoke, heavy with oil and moisture, clambers limply from the pan, and the beans patchily break past their golden threshold and acquire a brownish tinge. The explosions become more frequent, and the occasional bean flies out of the pan. The dull brown beans now turn rich brown and oily, and the aroma of the smoke that pours from them is like incense for the gods themselves. Finally, amidst a profusion of popping and smoke, the process has to be stopped quickly to prevent the oily beans blackening into worthless soot. This is best accomplished by pouring the coffee between two metal colanders outside in fresh cool air. Clouds of white chaff (the detached remains of the silverskin) waft into the breeze. The sound of the roasted beans will strike the ear, brittle but curiously strong. After a few minutes, the beans will cool, and voilà! – roasted coffee, perhaps one of the most dramatic transformations of a natural plant product that human intervention has yet devised solely for its pleasure. After ten minutes or so the beans are ready to be ground; the aroma then released is extraordinary, rich and sublime. Roasted coffee contains over eight hundred separate flavour and aroma components, most of which form in the crucible of the roaster. This strange alchemy accounts in part for the hold that coffee exerts over our imagination.

As well as being uniquely endowed with early men and early coffee, Ethiopia was home to another drug, namely qat or khat (Catha edulis), a psychoactive plant containing cathinone and cathine, which is greatly appreciated on both sides of the Red Sea today, but particularly in Yemen, where it represents a third of that country’s Gross Domestic Product. Qat induces a mild euphoria, alertness, and tranquillity, and is widely consumed in convivial communal qat chewing sessions which frequently take all afternoon, meandering conversations punctuated by poetry and hypnotic pauses. While it is interesting that Ethiopia should offer two notable drugs amongst its indigenous plants, judging by its effects, qat would seem the less likely cause of the ‘brain explosion’. It is also less exportable, as the active ingredients are susceptible to rapid decay, and only fresh leaves produce good results. Caffeine is, by contrast, almost indestructible, surviving the ordeal by fire, pulverization and oxygen deprivation which the coffee industry routinely inflicts on it for prolonged periods with no apparent diminution of its powers.

Setting aside the tempting but unproven image of coffee as an evolutionary catalyst, it nonetheless needs to be explained how coffee came into common use. Remains of many of the plants that were domesticated by mankind early in prehistory turn up in archaeological digs, allowing a plausible timescale and map for the spread of many plants to be developed. It can be asserted with some confidence that the domestication of plants – that is, the selective breeding of plants from their wild forbears to encourage characteristics most useful to man – began with cereals in about 8500 BC in the so-called Fertile Crescent, an area that encompassed the modern-day Mediterranean Near East, southern Turkey, and northern Iraq. The techniques and practice of cultivation quickly spread to areas with a comparable climate, and gave rise to the earliest civilizations – ancient Egyptians, for example, cultivated wheat, grapes, peas, beans, and barley, all of which depended on winter’s rains and shorter daylight hours.

In the Ethiopian Highlands specific indigenous plant species flourished that were used to summer rains, and even daylight hours throughout the year, as well as the lower temperatures that came with altitude. While coffee and qat remained wild, some of these other plants were domesticated, including teff (a tiny-seeded cereal used for enjera bread), noog (used for seed oils), ensete (a banana-like plant used for bread), and finger millet used for beer. Remarkably, for a plant that is now cultivated throughout the tropical world, coffee has not been shown by archaeology to have been domesticated before the sixteenth century. In fact, history is almost silent on all aspects of coffee cultivation and consumption in Ethiopia, with the exception of anthropologists’ reports of coffee being used, as already noted, for ‘chewing and blood-brotherhood ceremonies’ by the Buganda tribes, and in the ‘slaughtering of the coffee’ ceremony, in which the Oromo celebrated the birth of cattle or children. The Oromo, the tribes who inhabit the corner of south-west Ethiopia where coffee originated, considered coffee to be the buna qala – the tears of Waqa, the supreme sky god. It was believed that coffee destroyed cattle, so in the ceremony coffee was roasted, along with barley, in butter: the symbolic union of coffee and cow thus propitiating the guardian spirits, reaffirming life, stimulating procreation and all manner of useful things. It has been reported anecdotally that coffee mixed this way with butter was also eaten by soldiers, farmers, and merchants faced with hard work or long journeys. The anthropological supposition has been that if a tribe practised coffee consumption in certain ways in recent history, there is a chance that it may have done so in ancient times.