Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World

by Mark Pendergrast

  Overproduction was another unresolved issue, with 87 million surplus bags in 1966. Of those, Brazil held 65 million, while robustas clogged government stabilization boards in Africa. Scientists had made it possible to grow even more coffee. In a Brazilian lab, Jerry Harrington and Colin McClung, Rockefeller’s IBEC researchers, figured out that zinc and boron were essential micronutrients for coffee cultivation, and with the massive addition of lime and fertilizer, the barren Brazilian cerrado lands could support plantations. Agronomists made the situation even worse with new heavily producing hybrids. Their beans did not taste quite as good, but few noticed or cared. Capable of withstanding full sunlight, the new trees didn’t require shade trees, but they did demand fertilizer to grow so prolifically without mulch.100

  In 1968 the Brazilians instituted a drastic project to bulldoze or burn billions of older trees, and the International Coffee Organization (ICO) created a Diversification Fund to encourage coffee farmers to switch to other crops. Yet it was much easier for Brazil, with its gigantic fazendas, to cut back than it was for African countries, where smallholders relied on their few trees for a livelihood. In Kenya, for instance, 250,000 tiny farms grew coffee. As Uganda’s Roger Mukasa, chair of the ICO Council, asked, “Cut down whose trees and diversify to what?”

  Other troubles plagued the agreement as well. Although India and Indonesia increased production, for instance, their quotas were not readjusted. “Even justifiable claims of small exporting countries are apt to be ignored and decisions forced upon them by powerful groups with overwhelming voting strength,” wrote an anonymous Indian coffee grower.

  Since votes to change quota levels were so strife-ridden, the agreement was revised to specify a target price range. If the price fell below the base level, it would automatically trigger a proportional quota decrease; if the price rose above the ceiling, quotas would increase. In addition, the selectivity principle was introduced, so that different price targets were set for robusta (primarily Africa and Indonesia), unwashed arabica (mostly Brazil), Colombian milds (including Kenya), and other milds (primarily Central America). Despite the required certificates of origin, many countries found ways to flout the quotas, while smuggling and mislabeling increased.

  Another crisis soon surfaced. In a 1967 speech, President Johnson encouraged Latin American countries to industrialize so that they could export processed agricultural products rather than selling raw produce. However, when Brazil began to produce substantial quantities of soluble coffee for export to the United States, many in the U.S. coffee trade protested. “Brazilian powder,” as the trade called it informally, produced a superior taste to the robusta-laden U.S. products. Because the Brazilian government did not tax soluble exports as it did green beans, domestic manufacturers could sell for a substantial discount to solubles produced in U.S. factories. In 1965 Brazilian powder accounted for only 1 percent of the U.S. market; by the end of 1967 it had snagged a 14 percent share.

  The Brazilian powder crisis nearly derailed the new 1968 International Coffee Agreement, with Wilbur Mills, the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, telling the press that he would not support the new ICA unless the “discriminatory” Brazilian practices ceased. With a temporary compromise, the ICA was renewed, but the issue wasn’t resolved until 1971, when Brazil agreed to allow 560,000 bags of cheap green beans—destined for soluble production in the United States—to be exported duty-free, thereby leveling the playing field somewhat.

  The Brazilian soluble controversy left Latin American growers bitter. “Throughout the Hemisphere today there is a feeling of disappointment and frustration over the protectionist tendencies of the United States,” wrote a Costa Rican coffee man. Nevertheless, the ICA limped along. The agreement had been created to prevent average green coffee bean prices from declining below the 1962 level of 34 cents a pound, as well as to keep prices from climbing too high too quickly. By 1968, with the price hovering below 40 cents, it appeared that the system was working.

  Under the ICA, however, producing countries were hardly thriving. The glaring gap between the wealthy industrialized and poverty-stricken developing countries was widening. In 1950 the average income in consuming countries was three times that of coffee-growing nations. By the late 1960s it was five times greater. A U.S. laborer could earn more in four days than the average annual wage in Guatemala or Ivory Coast. “Malnutrition and gastroenteritis are endemic in these protein-starved regions, where one out of six children dies before the age of five,” observed Penny Lernoux in The Nation. “Coffee has no nutritional value. For these peasants it is worth only as much as it can buy in food and clothing. And because it buys so little, it is a bitter brew, the taste of poverty and human suffering.”

  The Think Drink Thunks

  Per-capita coffee consumption in the United States continued its gradual decline in the mid-1960s. The International Coffee Organization responded by voting a meager 15 cents-per-bag promotion allowance, which provided a 1966 worldwide advertising kitty of only $7 million, $3.5 million of which was allocated annually to the United States. The ICO hired McCann-Erickson, Coke’s ad agency, to create a campaign to seduce seventeen- to twenty-five-year-olds to drink coffee. The admen came up with the “Think Drink” slogan. Whenever a young adult had a difficult decision to make or serious studying to do, coffee would lubricate the brain cells.

  The campaign’s appeal to rationality was directed to a generation in open revolt against logic and reason. These young rebels looked for spontaneous enlightenment through LSD or marijuana. A Think Drink did not appeal. A Thrill Pill did.

  The National Coffee Association, with an even smaller budget, promoted youth-oriented coffeehouses on college campuses and in churches and civic organizations. The Pan American Coffee Bureau proudly noted that it was connecting with the “all-important youth sector” by serving coffee to the freshly scrubbed conservative teens in the Up With People program. These efforts to induce young adults to drink more coffee lasted for a couple of years but failed to produce any significant results.

  During the 1968 presidential elections, the National Coffee Association distributed 58,000 pamphlets, “Twelve Ways Coffee Can Help You Win Elections.” Instead of clinking cups at polite coffee parties, however, young Vietnam War protestors disrupted the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the police retaliated with a brutality that shocked the nation. In this era of the widely hailed generation gap, another brand of coffeehouse sprang up—not the sort that the NCA or the Pan American Coffee Bureau ever envisioned.

  The GI Coffeehouses

  While in the military at Fort Polk in 1963, Fred Gardner occasionally patronized bars serving watered-down, overpriced drinks in nearby Leesville, Louisiana. A few years later, in San Francisco, he had the idea to set up coffeehouses in army towns “for the hippies who couldn’t avoid military service.” In the fall of 1967, with Deborah Rossman and Donna Mickleson, Gardner opened the first GI coffeehouse in Columbia, South Carolina, near Fort Jackson. They named it the UFO—a play on USO, the United Servicemen’s Organization. On the walls they tacked up big black-and-white portraits of counterculture heroes such as Cassius Clay, Bob Dylan, and Stokely Carmichael—as well as one of Lyndon Johnson holding up a hound dog by the ears. The founders purchased a commercial espresso machine and a Chemex drip brewer, and arranged for a supply of high-quality beans. Soon after the UFO opened its doors, the coffeehouse was a magnet for antimilitary GIs. Agents from Military Intelligence began interrogating soldiers who hung out at the UFO. “They invariably asked what we were putting in the coffee,” Gardner recalled.

  Gardner relinquished leadership in 1968, but over the next few years, with the support of Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, and Jane Fonda, over two dozen GI coffeehouses sprang up outside army bases across the country. Drugs were banned. Fonda organized shows of “political vaudeville” and music—featuring Donald Sutherland, Country Joe MacDonald, and Dick Gregory—as a kind of mirror image of Bob Hope’s patriotic G
I programs.

  By October 1971 the coffeehouses had attracted the attention of Congressman Richard Ichord, chairman of the House Committee on Internal Security, who told his colleagues, “At many major military bases . . . , GI coffeehouses and underground newspapers, reportedly financed and staffed by New Left activists, have become commonplace. The coffeehouses serve as centers for radical organizing among servicemen.” A retired Marine Corps officer complained that “off-base antiwar coffeehouses ply GIs with rock music, lukewarm coffee, antiwar literature, how-to-do-it tips on desertion, and similar disruptive counsels.”

  Without consciously doing so, the GI coffeehouses replayed history. Ever since 1511, when Khair-Beg tried to close the coffeehouses of Mecca, these caffeinated meeting places had served as brood chambers for seditious literature and revolt against authority. Now the antiwar coffeehouses served as hotbeds for resistance to LBJ, and after the 1968 elections, Richard Nixon. As in the past, the authorities tried to shut them down. In several cases, arsonists burned the coffeehouses. The Ku Klux Klan targeted one, while others were riddled with gunfire. The surviving establishments eventually disbanded, but not before leaving their mark on American history.

  “Caution: Coffee May Be Hazardous to Health”

  A 1963 survey of nearly 2,000 factory workers seemed to implicate coffee in heart disease. Such epidemiological studies, which survey sample population groups, are difficult to evaluate, since they often don’t (or can’t) factor in other variables that may contribute to outcomes.101 The next year D. R. Huene, a Naval Reserve flight surgeon, asserted that navy pilots who drank too much coffee “complained of frequent heart flip-flops while in the air.” Such anecdotal reports weren’t scientific, but they made headlines.

  In 1966 Irwin Ross penned an attack on the drink in Science Digest. “Caffeine, the essential ingredient in coffee, is a poison. A drop injected into an animal’s skin will kill it within a few minutes. An infinitesimal amount applied directly to your brain would send your body into uncontrollable convulsions.” These observations, while true, are unfair, since coffee drinkers do not inject it or apply it directly through their skulls. Ross blamed coffee for stomach ulcers, coronary thrombosis, throat and stomach cancer, and nervous irritability, though he granted that the drink could help those suffering from migraines or asthma.

  “A new problem for the coffee industry is rearing its ugly head,” wrote Samuel Lee, the technical editor of the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal in 1966. “Serious scientific workers are trying to demonstrate that prolonged, continued or excessive consumption of beverage coffee may be deleterious, or even a serious health hazard.” Two years later he worried that research into coffee’s supposed ill effects could lead to a warning label similar to that forced on cigarettes: “Caution: Coffee May Be Hazardous to Health.”

  In 1969 the National Coffee Association created its Scientific Advisory Group (SAG), composed of scientists employed by the major roasters such as General Foods, Nestlé, and Procter & Gamble. They also hired the Arthur D. Little Company to conduct experiments they hoped would counter the negative information on coffee. Over the next fifteen years, the NCA would fund over twenty studies at a cost of $3 million.

  Yet the alarms over health continued. In 1971 Philip Cole, a Harvard researcher, reported that coffee might be linked to cancer of the bladder, particularly in women. In 1972 and 1973 Boston University’s Hershel Jick and colleagues reported patient surveys reinforcing the link between heavy coffee intake and heart disease. Studies in which pregnant rats were injected with or fed caffeine conducted in Japan, Germany, France, and England showed that with heavy dosages, the offspring of the caffeinated rats had more birth defects than control groups.

  Coffee soon was cleared on nearly all counts, as new studies failed to replicate earlier findings or conclusions were revised. Like most scare stories, however, initial claims linking coffee to diseases made headlines and a huge impact on the public consciousness, whereas later qualifications slipped quietly to the back pages. In response to health concerns, sales of decaffeinated coffee surged, increasing 70 percent from 1970 to 1975, when it accounted for 13 percent of coffee consumed in U.S. homes.

  General Foods triumphed with Sanka, whose dominant market share allowed larger profit margins than for regular coffee. In a stroke of genius, General Foods hired actor Robert Young to shill for Sanka in 1976, just as he was leaving a long stint as the kindly television doctor Marcus Welby, M.D. Now, in TV spots, Young explained that “many doctors tell millions of Americans to drink Sanka brand” if caffeine made them irritable. In one commercial, dinner guest Young witnesses young husband Phil explode angrily at his wife over something trivial, so he suggests Sanka, which “tastes just as good as regular coffee.” In 1971 Nestlé came out with a freeze-dried Taster’s Choice Decaffeinated, while General Foods created Freeze-Dried Sanka and Brim, virtually identical products. Because the Sanka brand already was firmly established with a medicinal image, Brim spots strove to attract the kind of health-conscious youth who shopped at natural foods stores. Tenco, owned by Coca-Cola, was delighted to provide decaffeinated coffee, putting the extracted caffeine into Coke. American capacity was overwhelmed, and many roasters sent their beans to Germany, where high-tech decaffeination plants worked around the clock.

  Even decaffeinated coffee was plagued by health concerns. A 1975 National Cancer Institute study indicated that, in massive doses, the solvent trichloroethylene (TCE) caused cancer in rats. Though TCE was used to decaffeinate green coffee beans, very little of the solvent remained in the beans, and that small amount was nearly all burned off during the roast. A frustrated General Foods executive pointed out that a human would have to consume 50 million daily cups of decaffeinated coffee for an entire lifetime to approximate the doses given the rats. Nonetheless, General Foods and other roasters abandoned TCE, switching to another chemical solvent, methylene chloride.

  Gold Floats, Coffee Sinks

  As world coffee prices drifted down to 35 cents in spring 1969, representatives of nine major Latin American and African coffee-producing countries—Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Ivory Coast, Mexico, Portugal (Angola), and Uganda—gathered in Geneva to plot strategy and to demand a “realistic quota level” for the ICA. This “Geneva Group” was encouraged in July when another frost, followed by a drought, hit Paraná, damaging 10 percent of the current crop and about 30 percent of the following year’s production. Prices rose 10 cents a pound by November, triggering the ICA’s automatic quota increase. Even with larger quotas, prices climbed over 50 cents a pound for Santos #4 by the beginning of 1970. Brazil, which had been bulldozing trees, now reversed itself, preparing a three-year plan to plant 200 million new trees. Though Brazil still held 37 million surplus bags, its reserves were being drawn down year by year. With the U.S. Congress about to vote on implementing legislation again, the producing countries agreed to raise quotas in August.

  In 1970 the leaf rust hemeleia vastatrix was discovered in Bahia, Brazil. Somehow—most likely on the clothing of African visitors—the spores had reached Latin America. A quick search revealed that the rust already had spread to parts of São Paulo and Paraná. Seeking to quarantine it, the Brazilians burned a scorched earth belt forty miles wide and five hundred miles long, but the disease jumped it. Throughout the decade hemeleia vastatrix would creep northward toward Central America. Brazil already had begun growing a small amount of disease-resistant robusta; now it increased acreage devoted to the inferior bean.

  On August 15, 1971, Nixon shook the world economy by cutting the dollar loose from gold, while temporarily freezing wages and prices. To pay for huge defense budgets and growing welfare expenses, Nixon devalued the dollar on December 20 by about 8 percent. This lowered effective coffee prices, and the producing countries asked for a reasonable adjustment. Led by the United States, the consuming countries refused. The producers reactivated the Geneva Group, announcing plans to undership ICA quotas in order to jack the price up
, in imitation of OPEC, the oil cartel.

  Such a move raised “doubts about the continuing viability of the International Coffee Agreement,” according to the National Coffee Association and the State Department. When prices did rise some 25 percent over the summer of 1972, the consuming countries blamed the Geneva Group. The ICA Council met to renegotiate the agreement, but neither side would compromise, and the quota agreement lapsed on December 11, 1972.

  One result of the agreement’s suspension was the resurrection of the New York Coffee and Sugar Exchange. On August 24, 1972, as it became clear that the agreement would probably founder, the first real activity in months occurred in coffee futures contracts. Five lots—each signifying 250 bags of coffee—due for delivery in March 1973 sold at 53 cents a pound. By the end of 1972 they were worth 61 cents a pound. The coffee commodities market sprang to life, with enough open interest—several thousand contracts—to offer some liquidity to traders.

  Coffee Inroads in Japan and Europe

  As a “new market” under ICA regulations, Japan received relatively inexpensive beans. Without the quota system Japan now would pay the same as everyone else. Before 1973 Japanese coffee imports had grown dramatically, with General Foods and Nestlé each opening Japanese plants to produce instant coffee. Determined to westernize, many Japanese embraced coffee—and Coca-Cola—as symbolic American beverages. The Japanese kissaten (coffeehouses) proliferated at the rate of 20 percent annually. By the mid-1970s there were 21,000 in Tokyo alone. The drinks were pricey by American standards, but the Japanese were willing to pay for a status symbol.