With capitalism, on the contrary, competitive pressures drove historically unprecedented rates of economic growth and industrialization by pushing all market agents toward increased productivity, technological innovation, and the relatively efficient investment of surplus wealth. The emergence of a new system of land tenure in England in the sixteenth century laid the basis for the unique conditions that would, over centuries, bring the transformation from feudalism to capitalism about. Whereas feudal peasants had formerly been tied to the land, devoting their energies primarily to subsistence farming, under the new rules they could now be dispossessed if they failed to make rent payments in currency. This meant that peasants had to produce for sale on the market, sparking new competitive pressures among them. As land became concentrated into fewer and fewer hands – those of the most successful farmers – thousands of former peasants flocked to the urban cities to sell their labor to survive. In doing so, they became the new industrial working class that was central to the capitalist transition underway in England by the end of the eighteenth century.6
Coffee and capitalism
More than just laborers, the urban working class, no longer producing food and materials at home for their own needs, formed a new mass consumer market in everyday goods. Coffee became a particularly popular product for this new market, well suited to the demands of the new factory system. With men, women, and children compelled to work at the factory for long hours with little time at home, coffee’s appeal stemmed from the fact that it could be prepared quickly and would not easily spoil. Coffee was also of great appeal to the capitalist classes, concerned as they were with a disciplined and controllable workforce, and so they welcomed coffee as a replacement to the more socially disruptive alcohol.
The growing popularity of coffee in Europe intensified slavery and imperialist statecraft abroad, as well as resistance to it. While Yemen remained the world’s largest coffee exporter until the middle of the eighteenth century, by the 1770s it had been eclipsed by the French Empire, which provided half the world’s coffee exports primarily through the forced labor of nearly half a million slaves on the colony of Haiti (then Saint Domingue). This dominance was brought to an end through a massive slave revolt beginning in 1791 and ending in 1804, with former slaves victoriously declaring an independent Haiti under black rule. The costs of the victory, however, were great, and continued aggression by colonial powers, combined with the huge economic, political, and social toll of the liberation struggle, wrecked the island’s export-dependent economy. This set the stage for long-term decline, the tragic impact of which is still felt today in Haiti, which continues to be one of the poorest countries in the world.
While Haitian independence put an end to the French Empire’s coffee dominance, the international coffee economy was just hitting its stride. The nineteenth century witnessed a major boom in coffee production and export throughout the South. Brazil, which gained independence from the Portuguese Empire in 1822, quickly emerged as the new undisputed leader of the global coffee industry. This marked a shift in Brazil away from sugar, which had been a dominant crop during the colonial period, grown on enormous fazendas (plantations) owned by a tiny agrarian elite. The elite ruled politically and economically over masses of African slaves who labored under terrible conditions, living an average of seven years after being “imported,” as it was considered cheaper to buy new slaves than to provide for the needs of existing ones. These conditions remained largely the same after independence, with Brazilian slave owners changing the crop, transitioning toward coffee in response to declining sugar prices.
In fact, as coffee growing in independent Brazil increased, so did the import of African slaves, with the slave population reaching over two million by the middle of the nineteenth century. Brazil was eventually compelled to end slave trading under pressure from the British, who formally abolished the slave trade in 1807. Domestic slavery, however, continued in Brazil until 1888, by which time Brazilian plantations had come to account for nearly half the world’s coffee production. Following Brazil’s lead, other countries picked up production to take advantage of coffee’s growing popularity, including Java, Ceylon, and the countries of Central America. Combined, these countries drove a glut in the global coffee market, with supply outpacing demand, driving prices down, which in turn increased its accessibility and popularity. In the United States, lower prices were facilitated by the fact that it was the only major coffee consuming country to import coffee tax-free for most years from 1832. By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States accounted for 40 percent of world coffee imports. Consumption also increased substantially in Europe, especially in Northern countries. The rapid increase in Brazilian production combined with equally impressive increases in North American and European consumption fundamentally altered the world coffee trade during a period referred to by historian Steven Topik as “coffee’s heroic nineteenth century.”7
Brazil not only led the world in coffee production in the nineteenth century, but also pioneered many of the planting, cultivation, and processing methods that still dominate much of the coffee world to this day. At the time, Brazil grew strictly Arabica beans, which were the only beans grown for export until the twentieth century, and remain the most widely exported. In terms of cultivation, Brazil was the first to carry out “full-sun” coffee growing on a massive scale. This involves clear-cutting all existing forestry to make way for coffee trees to be lined side by side in rows up and down hills. The sun-exposed trees grow rapidly, which is the method’s great advantage, but only at the expense of intensified soil erosion, the depletion of soil nutrients, and the elimination of natural predators to coffee pests and disease. Coffee trees are planted as monocultures, with a limited number of similar crop variants, resulting in Arabica trees coming from a narrow genetic stock and being highly susceptible to diseases, fungi, bacteria, and pests – most notably, coffee leaf rust (a fungus) and the coffee berry borer worm or la broca (a pest). Consequently, the full-sun method has generally resulted in escalating reliance on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and insecticides.
Not only has Brazil had to deal with the ecological impacts of full-sun, monoculture cultivation, but much of the country has also not been climatically well suited for coffee growing. The ideal coffee lands for Arabica beans are generally considered to be between 3,000 and 6,500 feet above sea level in warm areas with an average temperature between 17 and 25 degrees Celsius. Much of Brazil suffers from periodic frosts, which have ruined almost entire coffee harvests on many occasions, and the majority of the country is below 3,000 feet, resulting in beans that are considered to be of lower quality. Despite these shortcomings, Brazilian coffee has trudged on, driven by full-sun, high-input farming that has set in motion a long historical pattern where planters have exhausted existing lands and then moved on to clear-cut and plant new farms, often in the country’s ecologically sensitive and biologically diverse tropical rainforests. By the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, coffee farmers had exhausted the land in the Paraiba valley in Brazil, so they packed up and moved to the southern and western regions of the state of São Paulo.
As coffee production and export expanded, coffee came to play a central role in Brazil’s further integration into the global capitalist economy. This did not at first entail the development of a large working class and wage labor, as was the case in industrial England. Brazil’s coffee success began on the back of slavery. As slavery subsided, the agrarian elite turned toward debt peonage, wherein European immigrants were loaned the costs of passage to Brazil and a piece of land, but had to work under conditions of near-slavery until all debts were paid – from 1884 to 1914, over one million Italian immigrants came to Brazil in this way. The key component of Brazil’s integration was not free labor, but intensified dependence on the production of commodities for sale on the global market. Previous forms of agricultural production, whether large-scale or small-, had involved maintaining significant land and resource
s for growing food for local consumption. The expansion of coffee brought with it a significant transition toward monoculture plantations devoted almost entirely to gaining income through the export of commodities to distant markets.
This general trend was experienced throughout much of the coffee world, although in diverse ways, where pre-capitalist forms of production were pervasive in laying the groundwork for a capitalist economy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Throughout much of Central America, for example, many indigenous groups were self-sufficient and entirely uninterested in abandoning their plots for the vulnerability of wage labor. As a result, emerging capitalist states often forced them to do so, stealing communal indigenous lands and compelling them into slavery, debt peonage, or highly onerous tenant relations. A characteristic case occurred in Guatemala from 1873 to 1885 under the Liberal dictatorship of Justo Rufino Barrios. Barrios declared as “idle” all of the land not devoted to pasture or export crops, predominantly indigenous land, seized it, and handed it over to the powerful agrarian elite. To force Maya indigenous groups to work on the new plantations, Barrios employed direct coercion, reviving the colonial-era forced labor system.
Through this process, powerful agrarian elites possessing enormous coffee plantations rose to economic and political dominance throughout much of the coffee world. Smallholder cultivation, however, persisted as the predominant form of coffee landholding (the majority of the world’s coffee farmers are small-scale); as a key source of coffee supply for the global industry; and, frequently, as a major source of compulsory or semi-subsistence labor for nearby giant plantations.8 Under certain conditions, smallholders even emerged as the dominant coffee producers in the country. In Costa Rica and Colombia, for example, the relative lack of large stretches of available land, capital, and cheap labor resulted in coffee production being dominated by small and medium-sized farms, tenant farmers, or sharecroppers. These farmers, drawing on family labor and providing many of their own subsistence needs, could survive and sometimes thrive under conditions deemed unprofitable by agrarian elites.9
Whereas giant Brazilian planters pioneered full-sun coffee growing, small and medium farmers in Central America and Colombia played a central role in developing and extending the “shade-grown” method – although either cultivation method can be employed on farms of varying scale. Shade-grown farming involves growing coffee under the shade of the forest canopy, trimming the branches to allow in sunlight. While trees do not produce as many beans as under full-sun conditions, the soil is protected from erosion and nutrition loss. Shade-grown also avoids the high costs associated with chemical-intensive farming, and as a result has been and continues to be the method of choice for the majority of small farmers in Latin America. Since the early 1970s, however, many of the more developed coffee economies, including Costa Rica and Colombia, have turned to full-sun growing on a massive scale.
It is not just the cultivation method that varies significantly between and within coffee countries, but the primary processing method as well, which is considered to have the greatest impact on bean quality. In Brazil from the nineteenth century until today, the dominant processing method has been the “dry method.” This involves stripping coffee branches of all their cherries, which are then spread out on patios, turned several times a day, and allowed to dry and harden. The dry husks are then pounded off, leaving a green bean, which is then sized and polished before being exported. The method is fast and efficient, but generally considered to produce poorer quality beans, as both ripe and unripe beans are harvested together and beans can absorb flavors from the ground or get moldy lying on the patios. Today, around 90 percent of Brazil’s Arabica beans continue to be processed through the dry method, which is also common in other parts of the coffee world, including Ethiopia, Haiti, and Paraguay.
The other widely adopted primary processing technique is the “wet method,” which involves handpicking coffee cherries and immersing them in water, allowing the unripe beans to float to the top and be removed. The skin and pulp of the cherries are then removed in manual or gas-powered depulping machines, followed by a 24- to 48-hour fermentation process in large water tanks. If done carelessly, this stage can have negative ecological impacts, if the removed pulp is allowed to float carelessly downstream or if the wastewater is expelled back into nearby streams, which can lead to reduced oxygen levels in water and threaten aquatic life.10 Once depulped, the remaining green beans are dried in the sun or in large, heated cylinders, and broken, black, moldy, or over-fermented beans are removed. The wet method can be extremely labor intensive, but typically results in higher-quality beans. Consequently, it has been widely adopted by small farmers seeking a competitive advantage against large plantations with economies of scale. The wet method was first taken up on a large scale in Central America and Colombia and has since spread to Mexico, Peru, Kenya, and the rest of the coffee world. Regardless of whether the wet or dry method is chosen, the green beans have traditionally been the main final product exported from the South, with large-scale roasters in the North dominating the roasting, retailing, and high-tech processing of green beans into the brown whole, ground, or instant coffee recognizable to most consumers.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the colonial economy in Latin America had gradually given way to newly independent capitalist economies and the gradual expansion of wage labor relations, neither of which substantially altered the brutal working and living conditions of coffee workers and small farmers. Most of Latin America had gained formal independence from Spain and Portugal in the 1820s, giving way to formally independent nations run by elite classes who often ruled through a mixture of shame elections (that excluded the vast majority from voting) and political violence against the masses and electoral opponents. Hundreds of years of tumultuous expansion of a highly uneven world system had laid deep roots, and dominant patterns around the social relations of production had been forged, with huge swaths of the best coffee lands owned by powerful agrarian elites. These elites turned from slave labor and debt peonage to hiring landless, low-wage rural workers, while the rest of the coffee lands were divided into tiny parcels owned by marginalized, often indigenous, small farmers. Dominant patterns in international trade had also emerged, with Brazil and the rest of Latin America developing and maintaining their status as the dominant coffee growing region in the world to this day.
Source: ICO statistical database (http://www.ico.org), accessed November 14, 2013.
Figure 2.1 World’s top coffee exporters, 2012.
Deep rooted, however, does not mean static or unalterable, and the world coffee economy was and continues to be dynamic and ever changing. In the chapters that follow, we will see how Colombia emerged as one of the largest coffee producers in the first few decades of the twentieth century, several African countries became key players in the coffee industry with the rise of Robusta beans in the 1950s, and Vietnam made a dramatic move to become the world’s second largest coffee exporter in the 1990s (see figure 2.1). In recent decades, Brazil and emerging Asian economies have taken their place among the top coffee consuming countries in the world, threatening to topple the United States from its long-standing number one spot in the years to come. The social relations under which coffee is grown have also been altered and contested, provoking both violent backlashes from authoritarian states against the poor majority and, in some cases, genuine and meaningful social reform.
State violence and social change
During colonial times, imperial statecraft was conducted through a direct merger of economic and political power, with colonial states working in tandem with large mercantilist companies granted official trade monopolies by the home state in Europe. The decline of colonial power and the expansion of capitalism brought about a break-up in these official monopolies and the emergence of giant, private trading companies. This transition has often been viewed as a receding of the state from the market. The state, however, continued to grow and expand under capital
ism, and in coffee nations, agrarian elites often came to exert overwhelming direct and indirect influence on state policy and its military apparatus. The capitalist state continued to have a “territorial logic,” which meant protecting the perceived interests of the coffee economy (a key source of tariff revenues, foreign exchange earnings, national income, and political stability), as well as a “capitalist logic,” ensuring the separation of the economic and political, and above all enforcing and policing private property. Given the immense inequalities in coffee countries inherited from the past, protecting private property meant working against social reform or wealth redistribution in a context where the vast majority were poor landless workers and small farmers. This frequently led to extreme violence from the state, often supported by imperialist powers seeking to ensure that the rules of the capitalist economy were preserved at all costs.
Central America is perhaps one of the most telling examples of the tragic mixture of coffee and state violence in the twentieth century. The legacy of colonialism had left Central American nations with highly unequal distributions of land and wealth, an extreme degree of dependence on the export of coffee and bananas, and a firmly entrenched agrarian elite interested in reproducing and intensifying these patterns. The outcome was pervasive social class conflict, authoritarian violence, rebellion, genocide, and civil war.
The modern history of El Salvador, for example, has been rife with state violence, rooted in the forced displacement of thousands of peasants, beginning in the 1870s, by the state and agrarian elite, much of it carried out to create large coffee estates. The displaced peasants became vulnerable, low-wage workers on the new plantations. When the Great Depression of the 1930s caused large-scale unemployment and general crisis, an indigenous uprising was provoked in 1932 with the goal of regaining possession of displaced land. In response, the state and the agrarian elite unleashed what became known as La Mantanza (the Massacre) on the poor indigenous population, ordering the military and the elite’s private “White Guards” to slaughter an estimated 15,000–30,000 indigenous people in a matter of weeks. In its wake, El Salvador remained ruled by a series of brutal dictatorships, eventually exploding into civil war from 1980 to 1992. State-orchestrated violence and torture were the norm during the war, all backed by unwavering diplomatic, economic, and military support from the US government. Since the war ended, the state has initiated a series of liberal democratic reforms as part of the peace agreements with rebel groups, along with modest social and agrarian reforms, although inequality and everyday violence remain endemic.
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