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

by Mark Pendergrast

  In the early 1970s, Erna Knutsen fought her way into the male-dominated cupping room and became the doyenne of specialty coffee importers, seeking out her “green jewels.”

  In the 1970s, conscience-stricken liberals began to worry more about the plight of the campesino, who often received starvation wages while middlemen and roasters profited. This cartoon appeared in 1976.

  After starring in Father Knows Best and Marcus Welby, MD, actor Robert Young was the perfect pitchman for Sanka decaf, dispensing fatherly medical advice to avoid caffeine—even though in real life he suffered from depression and alcoholism.

  Folger’s Mrs. Olson, played by actress Virginia Christine, gave motherly advice to save coffee and marriages.

  In 1977, following the Black Frost in Brazil, coffee prices rose quickly, bringing consumer protests and congressional hearings.

  Ugandan coffee was indeed the country’s economic mainstain. Unfortunately, dictator Idi Amin relied on coffee earnings to fund his genocidal regime.

  When Folgers rolled East to challenge Maxwell House in the 1970s, a clever cartoonist portrayed Mrs. Olson duking it out with Aunt Cora, the Maxwell House busybody.

  In this Far Side cartoon, Gary Larson lampooned health concerns over caffeine, which peaked in the early 1980s.

  Young coffee idealists like Don Schoenholt, shown here in 1981, led the specialty revolution. “Rise up, my fine buckos, and assert your will,” Schoenholt advised.

  Fair Trade coffee organizations urge consumers to buy coffee that has been grown by well-paid workers, often using guilt-inducing tactics such as this Equal Exchange ad.

  By the early 1990s, caffeine addicts were loud and unrepentant.

  In serial episodes ranging over months and years, Sharon flirted with her neighbor Tony over the freeze-dried coffee in commercials positively dripping with sexual innuendo, sensuality, and intrigue.

  In Starbucks modern incarnation, the original mermaid logo (left) has been sanitized as a demure New Age coffee maiden.

  Not everyone loved Starbucks. Critics accused the chain of using aggressive, predatory tactics to put smaller coffeehouses out of business, as in this 1996 cartoon.

  Inspired by a trip to Italy, Howard Schultz spread the espresso/cappuccino/ latte gospel through the Starbucks Experience, taking over the company in 1987 and taking it global.

  Those concerned about preserving habitat for migratory birds can buy shade-grown coffee. This label shows that Golden Valley Farms is certified as ‘Bird-Friendly’ by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center.

  During the 1990s, environmentalists and birders created a market for “bird-friendly coffee” grown in shaded plantations that provide important habitat for migratory birds and other rain forest animals.

  Coffee retailer Bill Fishbein’s first visit to poverty-stricken Guatemalan farms in 1988, inspired him to found Coffee Kids, which provides micro-credit loans to promote alternative income in coffee communities.

  Courtesy Coffee Kids.

  This Fair Trade logo assures consumers that the coffee beans they pruchase were grown by democratically run cooperatives of small farms that receive a decent price for their beans. There are also other certifications and ways to help farmers.

  Some think that coffee addiction is no joke, though “Too Much Coffee Man” cannot endure his banal and meaningless existence without it.

  Whole Beans and Gorgeous Women

  As the major corporations gobbled other companies, innovative specialty outfits invaded grocery stores. Bernie Biedak bought all manner of things at U.S. Customs auctions and sold them at his hip store in Ashland, Oregon. In 1978 he bought two bags of confiscated Guatemalan green coffee beans, had them roasted, then sold the beans for a huge profit. He bought more beans from Gary Talboy at Coffee Bean International and installed clear-plastic gravity-flow bins in the produce aisle of Oregon supermarkets. He hired gorgeous professional models to deliver the coffee and maintain the grinders. Biedak sold the beans at $3.99 a pound, providing the store managers a much larger profit than did canned coffee—and the beautiful delivery women didn’t hurt either. By 1983 Biedak had expanded to San Francisco.

  Starbucks’ Jerry Baldwin sold bulk wholesale beans through his Blue Anchor division. Baldwin, a purist, didn’t like the supermarket business, where he couldn’t completely control quality. Phil Johnson, who left Goodhost when Nestlé bought it, purchased Blue Anchor, making his company, now called Millstone, one of the largest whole-bean supermarket players. In Southern California, stores featured Sark’s Gourmet Coffee. In Fort Bragg, California, Paul Katzeff put Thanksgiving Coffee into bulk bins in supermarkets, while Steve Schulman did the same in northern California with his Hillside gourmet beans.

  Across the country in rural New Hampshire, Marty Elkin and manager Mike Sullivan introduced the Café Du Jour brand in gravity-feed bins, one-way valve bags, and innovative two-ounce miniature sample brick packs. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters was also expanding. Already a millionaire from creating and selling EZ Wider papers for marijuana smokers, Bob Stiller was blown away by the gourmet coffee he tried one day in 1981 in the Phoenix Restaurant in Waitsfield, a Vermont ski town. Stiller bought out the original small roasters and dramatically expanded the business.

  The major roasters realized they were missing something. “The big boys began to show up at Fancy Food shows and crawl all over us,” Donald Schoenholt recalled. “We were all outraged. At the same time, we thought it was funny in a scary way. All you had to do was look at these people to see that even with the ideas right under their noses, they didn’t get it.”

  Quotas and Quagmires

  Even with new International Coffee Agreement quotas in place, the early 1980s witnessed substantial price volatility. In 1981, the first enforcement year, prices dropped below $1.15 a pound, triggering four successive quarterly quota cuts. Even so, the price briefly fell below $1 a pound for the first time in five years. The following year, it rose to a $1.25 level and hovered there long enough to secure a new agreement, good until 1989. Under the Reagan administration, with its emphasis on free trade, the United States reluctantly ratified the 1983 ICA.

  “Tourist coffee” now sold to nonmember countries at discounts of 50 percent or more, and most consuming countries were not happy, though West Germany and France made a great deal of money from the tourist coffee that flowed in and out of the tax-free ports of Hamburg and Le Havre. Smuggling and counterfeit certificates of origin abounded. In 1983 U.S. Customs confiscated $26 million in illegal beans.

  As the decade wore on, ICA regulations frustrated roasters who sought high-quality beans. The “other mild” countries (Kenya, Ethiopia, Central America, Peru) were not allowed to export more of their better beans.

  Rollinde Prager, the U.S. delegate to the annual quota renegotiation in 1985, objected strenuously to the two-tier price system and Brazil’s deliberate undershipment of quotas. An agreement was struck literally at the last moment, with the United States casting the only negative vote. “The outcome may not bode well for the future of the International Coffee Agreement or our participation in it,” Prager said ominously.113

  Guerrilla Wars, Coffee Disasters

  In Angola, due to civil war, coffee exports had tumbled from 5.2 million bags in 1974 to fewer than 300,000 bags in 1984. “Stories from the surrounding countryside tell of fast-growing elephant grass coursing through neglected coffee fields,” wrote a reporter. In Central America, three countries with a legacy of coffee oligarchies and poverty-stricken campesinos descended into prolonged internal struggle. “We are barefoot, but we are many,” a Guatemalan peasant magazine declared in 1980. “We produce the riches that the landowners and all the powerful count, enjoy, and waste. Therefore, when we stop working, the wealth that they enjoy stops as well. Without us, they are nothing.” Though that may have been true, the military and oligarchy still held the true power. Guatemalan General Fernando Romeo Lucas García ruled with an iron fist and mounted a campaign against guerrillas that by
1981 amounted to genocide. “I saw the soldiers cut open the bellies of pregnant women and throw the unborn babies on the fire they had built,” a fourteen-year-old witness recalled. While the guerrillas committed their share of atrocities, the vast majority were committed by the army. Many Indians had joined the guerrillas, but soldiers felt free to kill any Indian they met.

  In 1982 a military coup ousted Lucas García, replacing him with General Efraín Ríos Montt, a born-again Christian. Ríos Montt first declared an amnesty, but he soon resumed the bloody war of extermination. In 1983 the Inter-American Human Rights Commission cited the Guatemalan army for the “very gravest violations of human rights, including the destruction, burning, and pillaging of entire villages.”

  Most coffee growers tried to avoid taking sides, praying that their fincas would be spared. Among them was Walter Hannstein, owner of La Paz. Whenever the military asked Hannstein for a truck, he always made an excuse that it was broken. Then the guerrillas insisted on talking to him. “My mother said that they might as well do it in a civilized manner,” Betty Hannstein Adams recalled. “So they served coffee and pastries while they talked.” When the military heard about the meeting, they decided that Hannstein was too friendly with the guerrillas, so they bivouacked three hundred men on the farm. Once the army left, the guerrillas concluded that Hannstein was too friendly with the army, so they burned his farm.

  A coup replaced Ríos Montt with another military dictator in 1983, but the death squads continued to roam. “The blunt presence of armed men is everywhere,” a visitor observed. Overhearing this comment, a bystander laughed. “If you think there are a lot of guns here, you ought to see El Salvador.”

  Indeed, violence and repression in tiny neighboring El Salvador were at least as bad as in Guatemala. About the size of New Jersey, El Salvador, with over 4 million people, was the most densely populated country in the Western Hemisphere. The life of the campesino had become intolerable. “It is better to die quickly fighting than to die slowly starving,” one guerrilla fighter said. Throughout Latin America, but particularly in El Salvador, liberal Catholic clergymen spoke out against the institutionalized violence. As a result, many priests were assassinated.

  The United States did not take a firm moral stand against the killings. Fearful that all of Central America would fall to Communist influence (as had Nicaragua), the United States supported the repressive governments of El Salvador and Guatemala with helicopters and anti-insurgency training while trying to nudge them toward mild reforms. The U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) dumped money into ameliorative social programs while Congress authorized millions in military aid.

  In 1980, under pressure from the Carter administration, a much-trumpeted land reform law was passed in El Salvador, but it barely touched the coffee oligarchy. At the same time, the reforms served as a cover for greater repression by the troops supposedly sent to enforce land division. On March 23, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero delivered a powerful sermon. “We should like the government to take seriously the fact that reforms dyed by so much blood are worth nothing,” he preached. “In the name of God, in the name of our tormented people who have suffered so much and whose laments cry out to heaven, I beseech you, I beg you, I order you, in the name of God, stop the repression.” The next day, as Romero celebrated a memorial mass, he was shot and killed.

  Romero’s death signaled the beginning of ever-more savage attacks. “For the death squads, death was not punishment enough,” wrote Tom Buckley in his 1984 book, Violent Neighbors. “Bodies often bore the marks of torture. It was nothing exquisite—fingers and joints crushed by hammerblows, flesh burned away by blowtorch, large areas of skin removed by the flayer’s knife.” Feuding guerrilla movements banded together to form the FMLN, a united rebel force, and open warfare began in 1981.

  Right-wing Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, widely rumored to be associated with the death squads and the founder of the conservative ARENA (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista) party, led a coalition that won control of the Constituent Assembly in the 1982 elections. Even though Duarte’s Christian Democrats technically ruled, it was clear that the repressive right wielded the real power. The pattern for years of bloodshed was set.

  Having ceded power to the military years ago to maintain repressive order, the coffee oligarchy found that it had created a monster over which it had insufficient control. The majority favored peace negotiations, limited democracy, and free markets. A sizable minority of coffee growers, however, led by Orlando de Sola, lobbied for another matanza (massacre) to restore order. He dismissed the 75,000 killed in the early 1980s by army terrorists and death squads as “Communist stooges” who deserved to die.

  ARENA was closely identified with both coffee factions. Ricardo “Rick” Valdivieso, who cofounded the party with D’Aubuisson, was a coffee grower with a long Salvadoran pedigree. In 1985 Alfredo “Fredi” Cristiani, one of the country’s largest coffee growers, replaced D’Aubuisson as the ARENA head. Even with a coffee man in a position of power, El Salvador’s government continued to profit from INCAFE (Instituto Nacional del Café), the nationalized coffee monopoly that sold the country’s beans at international prices in dollars, while paying producers in local currency equivalent to one-half or less of its real value. Distressed by low domestic prices, coffee growers stopped applying fertilizer, and some abandoned their farms completely.

  As in Guatemala, the farmers were caught between the guerrillas and the death squads, with the large producers more at risk. A documentary filmmaker followed guerrillas onto the Regalado Dueñas plantation. “They are multimillionaires,” one rebel explained. “So we are burning this estate because they mistreat their workers.” Many Salvadoran farmers came to secret accommodation with the guerrillas, agreeing to pay their workers more and contributing to the rebel FMLN, which controlled a quarter of the coffee-growing regions by 1985.

  In neighboring Nicaragua, most coffee growers had supported the 1979 Sandinista revolution that overthrew the hated Somoza regime. The new regime nationalized coffee exports through ENCAFE, a new government agency that paid the producers only 10 percent of the international market price. After taking all the profits, the Sandinistas supplied easy credit, but this only drove the farmers further into debt.

  At the beginning of the revolution, the Sandinistas had taken over the vast Somoza coffee holdings, administering the farms as state-run enterprises. Unfortunately, the urban intellectual Sandinistas knew little about growing coffee. In an attempt to eliminate roya, the leaf rust disease, they cut down all the shade trees, selling them for lumber. They failed to fertilize or prune properly. At that time the government instituted the CONARCA program, in which they took over farms with the announced intention of “renovating” before returning them to the owners. Renovation meant ruination, timber harvesting, and neglect. Few farms were ever returned.

  Anyone who questioned Sandinista politics or policies was labeled a capitalist parasite. Throughout most of the 1980s, any farms that did not produce sufficiently, or whose owners were too vocal, were confiscated. In May 1982 Roger Castellon Orué, one of the most enthusiastic Sandinista supporters, attended his son’s graduation at a private Miami high school, where he got a call from a friend. “Don’t come back. They have confiscated your farm and declared you an enemy of the people.” Castellon had left over $1 million worth of processed coffee back in Nicaragua. All of it was gone, along with his house, beneficio, and personal possessions. He found work in Kmart’s plant department. His experience was far from unique. Another farmer’s land was expropriated when he left the country for medical treatment.

  Disaffected expatriates formed the Contra movement and, supported by the U.S. government, made incursions from bases just across the Honduran border. The Sandinistas did improve the lot of the urban poor, with literacy programs and medical services, but the plight of the campesino worsened. The coffee growers could not afford to pay their workers decent wages. Those who allowed laborers to cultivate su
bsistence plots were afraid of their farms being confiscated because they were not using them “efficiently.” Many campesinos turned to crime or joined the Contras. “Who are the real exploiters of the poor?” one farmer asked. “They [the government] only allow my workers four ounces of rice a day. I want to give them more, so who is exploiting the workers?”

  The Sandinistas recruited urban high school and college students to harvest the coffee, along with liberal volunteers from the United States and Europe. They were slow and inefficient. The Contras stepped up raids to disrupt the coffee harvest, killing not only Sandinistas but lowly harvesters, including women and children.114

  There were no death squads in Nicaragua, however. One coffee grower suspected of aiding the Contras was arrested, stripped naked, and interrogated for hours, but he was not physically harmed. Compelled to relocate entire communities into “controlled zones,” the Sandinista army forced 200,000 peasants off their land. Many fled across the border to Honduras, seeking protection from the Contras. Eventually, a half-million Nicaraguans—one-seventh of the population—lived in exile.

  Responding to the defections, the Sandinistas began giving land to campesinos. “We gave them land and a gun and said, ‘This is yours. Now defend it,’” recalled General Joaquin Cuadra Lacayo, the Nicaraguan Army chief of staff. “We called it ‘agrarian reform,’ but the logic was strictly military. We wanted to stop them from joining the contras.” With no management experience and little profit incentive, they let the coffee rot.