The Taste of Many Mountains
Page 1
Advance Praise for
The Taste of Many Mountains
“Both a personal voyage of discovery and a description of how researchers have come to understand Fair Trade, The Taste of Many Mountains sheds light on the long journey that coffee makes from small holder farms in Guatemala to the barista. The story captures key elements of our research on the impact of fair trade coffee and addresses profound questions about global poverty.”
— CRAIG MCINTOSH Professor of Economics, Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California at San Diego
“Coffee lovers are on a continual quest for the great cup of coffee. Dr. Bruce Wydick is on a simultaneous quest to understand how some of those great coffees are nurtured and grown by some of the world’s poorest farmers. And that begins the story, the mystery, and the twists in The Taste of Many Mountains. The noble lives of the growers he portrays who farm the hillsides of Guatemala could only be developed by the heartfelt, firsthand knowledge of a researcher who has lived in their midst, agonized with their struggles, and admired their characters. Anybody who wants to ‘do good’ needs to read The Taste of Many Mountains! An excellent novel in its own right—it also explodes the illusion of easy answers and cliché responses to the challenges of globalization and alleviating poverty. Dr. Wydick’s first novel is brewed perfectly for his readers—full of rich body with double-shots of insight.”
— SANTIAGO “JIMMY” MELLADO President & CEO Compassion International
“Pack your bags, join a colorful international research team of graduate students, and head to the Guatemalan highlands as an economic sleuth—or read this book. It will transport you into the world of cutting edge economics and into the lives of people far away whose stories are surprisingly interwoven with our own. This book is a wonder: simultaneously thought-provoking and educational, entertaining and gripping, and deeply moving.”
— CHRIS AHLIN Associate Professor of Economics, Michigan State University
“What actually works to reduce poverty in poor countries? A distinguished development economist uses the unusual format of a well-written, emotion-packed novel, weaving together careful history and sophisticated economics, to show the ordinary reader what works and what does not. Gripping, enlightening, and very readable. A must read.”
— RON SIDER founder of Evangelicals for Social Action
“Bruce Wydick’s story is a tale of discovery, a quest to Central America to find out how the coffee trade really works. While sympathetically portraying a range of perspectives about international economics, wealth, and poverty, the book is also a meditation on how we know anything about the workings of the economy.”
— DEAN SCRIMGEOUR Assistant Professor of Economics, Colgate University
“The Taste of Many Mountains will amuse, confuse, and perhaps displease its readers. While a novel about economics graduate students would seem to many to be, at best, an effective treatment for insomnia, this book is both engaging and thought-provoking. Anyone who is interested in reducing poverty in developing countries would learn much from this book, and those who think they already know how to achieve this goal are likely to learn the most.”
— PAUL GLEWWE Professor, Department of Applied Economics, University of Minnesota
“Bruce Wydick takes us to the coffee plantations of rural Guatemala, traces the production path to the lattes we sip each day, and asks some penetrating questions: Why do coffee growers’ children remain shoeless despite the success of the Fair Trade scheme? Why does a bout of bad weather profit these impoverished farmers more? What can we truly do to ensure they’re paid a living wage? A detective story and an economics lesson in one, The Taste of Many Mountains is an engaging read on one of today’s critical justice issues.”
— SHERIDAN VOYSEY writer, speaker, broadcaster, and author of Resurrection Year: Turning Broken Dreams into New Beginnings
“Bruce Wydick successfully mixes adventure, mystery, and economic analysis in his novel. His book will generate great discussions in an introductory Economic Development class or a Latin American studies course. Students with little or no exposure to life in a developing country will get a compassionate view of the origins of something we often take for granted: a cup of coffee.”
— EMILY CONOVER Assistant Professor of Economics, Hamilton College
“Building on a dominant, tangible ritual of modern society—coffee drinking—Bruce has crafted a thoughtful story of economic and personal discovery. The narrative is rich in economic principles, filled with insights into the richness and process of doing research fieldwork, and packed with perspectives on poverty and global markets.”
— TRAVIS LYBBERT Associate Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California at Davis
© 2014 by Bruce Wydick
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc.
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Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
ISBN 978-1-4016-8993-3 (eBook)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wydick, Bruce, 1954–
The taste of many mountains / Bruce Wydick.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-4016-8992-6 (paperback)
1. Coffee growers—Guatemala—Fiction. 2. Coffee industry—Fiction. 3. Globalization—Fiction. 4. Guatemala—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3623.Y36T37 2014
813'.6—dc23
2014007192
14 15 16 17 18 19 RRD 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
POSTSCRIPT
READING GROUP GUIDE
LIST OF REFERENCNCES BY CHAPTER
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The taste of many mountains imbued my coffee cup.
But I knew not of where it came before I drank it up.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
> THE COFFEE MARKET IS A COLLISION BETWEEN THE RICH world and the poor world. I consider this as I sit at a breezy café in Berkeley, watching the coffee next to my laptop getting cold.
The price I paid for the cup of coffee sitting in front of me represents a tiny fraction of the income coffee consumers like me in rich countries earn every day. But it equals the daily wage of a coffee laborer in the developing country where the coffee is grown. As a development economist, I am familiar with the data: the wages of the coffee drinkers around me are more than a hundred times greater than that of the man, woman, or child who picked the coffee beans used to make this drink.
Coffee is produced in what many call the Third World for consumption in the First World. The contrasts between these worlds are painfully manifest in the statistics. Consider the economically average person in the top ten coffee-consuming countries. Since we are on the subject of coffee, I’ll call him Joe: Joe Average. The counterpart to Joe, the economically average person in the top ten coffee-producing countries, I will call Joaquin. The first difference between Joe and Joaquin is their difference in income. Because Joe’s income is many times higher than Joaquin’s, Joe can consume more of just about everything than Joaquin. This includes some things that he needs—like housing, food, and health care—as well as things that he doesn’t, like his chrome-plated espresso machine.
Joaquin’s children are much less healthy than Joe’s children. In fact, they are about ten times more likely than Joe’s children to die before they reach the age of five. And if Joaquin’s children live past age five, there is a one in six chance that they will be chronically malnourished. The chances that Joe’s children will be chronically malnourished are essentially nil.
I consider the many people I have met in Guatemala like Joaquin who cultivate coffee for a living. Many can barely spell their name. Indeed, one out of five adults in the coffee-producing world is illiterate, with the rate far higher among coffee laborers themselves. Among the Joes of the coffee-consuming world, adult illiteracy is rare, less than 1 percent. And almost four in five adults use the Internet in Joe’s world, while fewer than one in five use it in Joaquin’s world. The digital divide between Joe and Joaquin is a digital chasm.
Compared to the coffee-consuming world, the coffee-producing world is also a violent world. Joe has never lived through a civil war. They are tragedies he reads about that affect poor people in poor countries who live across oceans. Indeed, not one of the top two dozen coffee-consuming countries has experienced a civil war in the last fifty years. Joaquin’s family has probably endured a civil war, for in the last fifty years, civil wars have afflicted most of the large coffee-producing nations: Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Peru, Rwanda, Uganda, and Vietnam.
Civil wars are sparked by the harsh inequalities in the coffee-producing world: prodigious land ownership among the privileged few mingled with the cheap labor of the uneducated masses. These glaring inequalities in the coffee-producing world brew a deep-rooted social discontent that in sequence provokes repression, government brutality, and, all too often, war.
Coffee was discovered not in the rich world, but in the poor world. Scientists have traced the coffea arabica plant to the Kaffa province of southwest Ethiopia, a region that remains one of the world’s poorest. Indeed, there is evidence from this area dating to the sixth century AD that Ethiopian warriors mixed ground-up beans from the coffea arabica with animal fat. Rolling the concoction into little balls, they created a low-tech energy blob they consumed before going into battle.
One of the early coffee legends from Ethiopia recounts the tale of a young Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi, who was surprised to discover his goats frolicking friskily after consuming the fruit from a wild bush. Probably bored with his pastoral duties, Kaldi decided to try the fruit himself, and was quickly overcome with a newfound vivacity and exhilaration. When rumors of the stimulatory effects of the plant reached the head of a nearby monastic order, the monk began to ingest the fruit himself, and stumbled upon the idea of boiling it in water to create a hot drink that would keep his monks from falling asleep during evening prayers (apparently easier than making his prayers a little more exciting).
In the sixteenth century coffee spread from Ethiopia to Egypt and to the Arabian Peninsula, specifically near present-day Yemen. Shortly after, it spread to Europe, making successful forays into different European countries, particularly the Netherlands, Italy, France, and England. By 1650 Oxford had its first coffeehouse, and a year or two later the first coffeehouse opened in London. Puritans in England took readily to the new drink because it seemed to be widely adopted as a substitute for opium and alcohol, both of which they detested. It was regarded by many at the time as a “sobering beverage” and a “mighty nutrient for the brain.”
By the mid-eighteenth century, thousands of coffeehouses across Europe in cities such as Marseilles and Venice were becoming centers of conversation among merchants, businessmen, and civic-minded intellectuals. In many urban centers, the coffeehouses became places where locals from all walks of life could go to read a newspaper, catch up on political gossip, or discuss the latest enlightenment philosophies. In England, coffeehouses were sometimes called “penny universities” for the education they offered to their customers at the price of a one-penny admission. Many prestigious institutions evolved from these coffeehouses in Britain, including the Royal Society, which began as a gathering of students at the Oxford Coffee Club. The great financial house Lloyds of London began as a coffeehouse catering to merchants involved in overseas trade.
But Europeans quickly discovered that their home continent was unsuitable for coffee-growing. As a result, the crop would be introduced for cultivation almost entirely in European colonies. The Dutch introduced coffee cultivation in Java in 1696, perhaps the first instance of coffee being cultivated in a European colony for eventual consumption in Europe. Around this time a pattern became established: coffee would be consumed in the rich world and cultivated in the poor world.
How did coffee come to Guatemala? It is claimed that the beans used to begin coffee cultivation in much of Latin America and the Caribbean came from a solitary plant. In 1714 the Burgermeister of Amsterdam bestowed on King Louis XIV of France the gift of a single coffee plant, a descendant from a Dutch coffee estate in its colony in Java. The king treasured the seedling and had it planted in the Royal Garden in Paris. Realizing that the crop could be cultivated more successfully in the colonies, the French naval officer Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu was given one of the few surviving descendants of that plant to bring to Martinique, where the king desired to establish overseas French coffee cultivation.
The ship encountered myriad obstacles in its quest across the Atlantic. Attacks by Tunisian pirates and ferocious storms threatened the boat. There was a scuffle aboard the ship between de Clieu and a jealous rival, when at one dramatic moment, a branch of the coffee plant was torn off. At another point in the voyage, the sailing ship stalled for weeks without wind in the Doldrums, and the crew was running so low on water that it had to be rationed. Faithful to his duty, de Clieu allocated part of his ration to the fragile plant.
Just a few years after the 1726 planting of de Clieu’s coffee seedling in Martinique, twenty million coffee plants were growing on the Caribbean island, and Louis XIV appointed de Clieu governor of the Antilles region. And so it was from de Clieu’s original plant that many coffee plants were ultimately taken to cultivate other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean.
It is believed that somewhere between 1750 and 1760, Jesuit missionaries, desiring to bring opportunities for agricultural prosperity to the native Indians, began to import coffee plants from the Dominican Republic and Cuba to their missions in Central America. One of their first destinations: Guatemala.
This book is a work of fiction, but it is based on a true story of a group of graduate students who embarked on a journey that crossed two worlds to follow a trai
l of coffee beans, from a peasant farmer in Guatemala to a café in San Francisco. The assignment we gave them was to calculate the profit made at every stage. What the researchers and students involved with the project discovered from this journey was a story that was too compelling not to tell.
Although many of the major characters resemble students I have worked with and people I have encountered in the course of my research, they (and most of the minor characters in the book) are fictional. Yet most of the events recorded in the story are true in that they are taken from actual experiences and from stories that have been recounted to me in the hundreds of interviews I have carried out over the years of my fieldwork in rural Guatemala.
The chasm between the world in which coffee is consumed and the world in which coffee is grown is not easily grasped through the recitation of economic facts and figures, summaries of academic studies, and policy briefs. The crossing of these two worlds must be experienced. And it is my hope that you will experience this crossing through the eyes of my students, as they themselves experienced it. The tension around globalization and poverty is observed through the lives and experiences of characters rather than through an orderly pedagogy. I want to involve readers in the plight of characters affected by global issues rather than merely present the more general and esoteric theories that are the preferred medium of economists. I want to engage readers in this crossing of two worlds as much as I want to inform.
The coffee market is a microcosm of the intersection of economies and cultures that accompanies economic globalization. It illuminates the disparities between the rich world and the poor world, and yet creates a space in which these two worlds meet to carry out business. In the coffee market, the rich meet the poor, and awareness grows of the chasm that separates them.
On one side are lives too often ripped apart by poverty and violence; on the other side are lives more often blessed with peaceful prosperity. And as our awareness of the chasm grows, we yearn for quick solutions that would create an economic bridge across it, to somehow assuage the dissonance we feel in our conscience created by these contrasts.