by Taylor Clark
De Clieu thought he could change things and become a national hero in the bargain. His plan was simple: (1) he would chaperone a few coffee seedlings back to Martinique, where he assumed they would take to the rich tropical earth; (2) a forest of riches would sprout up for France; (3) honors, titles, and rewards would descend on him. Easy. Con-ve-niently, France had just acquired its first coffee plant, which resided in Paris’s royal Jardin des Plantes. A few years before, King Louis XIV had gone through lengthy negotiations with the city of Amsterdam to obtain just one five-foot-tall coffee tree. Since then, the garden’s botanists had doted over its cultivation.
De Clieu presumed the king would surely part with a sapling or two for the glory of France, but his formal requests for coffee sprouts won him nothing but rejection and scorn; he was too lowly a minion to merit even a leaf from the king’s prize. De Clieu prowled the sprawling grounds of the royal gardens for days, hoping to swipe a coffee sprig when no one was looking. The opportunity never came. He grew desperate.
But he didn’t lack for ideas. According to his letters — written a half-century later — de Clieu recruited a beautiful noblewoman to convey the full significance of the cause to the royal physician, a man with after-hours access to the gardens. He got his plant shortly thereafter, in a physician-assisted moonlight raid on the Jardin des Plantes. Loot in hand, de Clieu fled to the coast, and in October 1720 he set sail for Martinique aboard the merchantman Le Dromedaire. To protect his fragile charge from salt water and the ship’s rats, de Clieu constructed a makeshift green-house out of spare glass, wood, and wire. All he had to do now was keep it alive through the long voyage.
Unseen dangers lurked in the shadows, however, imperiling his mission to caffeinate the New World. * As de Clieu told it in his letters, the first menace surfaced a couple of weeks into the journey, when the ship’s passengers awoke in the dead of night to find themselves under attack from a Tunisian corsair. Le Dromedaire’s twenty-six cannons soon convinced the pirates to call off their assault. Just days later, another threat emerged: de Clieu caught a fellow passenger inside his cabin, looming menacingly over the greenhouse — a man who, suspiciously, spoke French with a Dutch accent. Before de Clieu could stop him, the Dutch spy managed to rip a branch off the tiny seedling. Yet the tree survived. After this, de Clieu scarcely let the plant out of his sight.
Still, his vigilance couldn’t hold back Mother Nature. A few hundred miles from de Clieu’s destination, a tempest nearly snapped Le Dromedaire in half. Then the fickle Ca-rib-be-an winds stopped blowing entirely. The ship was becalmed for over a month in an area sailors called the “horse latitudes,” because dead winds and low rations sometimes forced them to eat the larger, four-legged passengers on board. As stores of drinking water dwindled, each passenger was limited to a half cup of water per day; the noble de Clieu chose to share his ration with the coffee plant. “I would have died of thirst to keep alive the plant . . . upon which my happiest hopes were founded and which was the source of my delight,” he later wrote.
By the time the ship finally sighted the black sands of Martinique, the seedling had shriveled to the size of a pinkie. De Clieu took no chances with its cultivation. When he reached his estate in Precheur, he planted the feeble sprout in easy view of his house, surrounding it with thorn hedges and ordering his slaves to guard it at all hours. As he’d hoped, the coffee plant flourished in the tropical climate, under the shade of the native mahogany and rosewood trees. Within five years, it had spawned two thousand new coffee trees on the island, and de Clieu sent seeds along to Guadeloupe, Santo Domingo, and other nearby French colonies. (De Clieu did end up getting his reward, eventually becoming governor of Guadeloupe and a chevalier in the French Legion of Honor.) By 1777, this one sapling had sired over eighteen million coffee plants on Martinique alone; at the end of the century its offspring were producing coffee cherries from Mexico to Brazil and throughout the West Indies.
According to coffee lore, the seedling de Clieu brought to Martinique is the father of most of the coffee trees in Latin America today. The trees thrived in the hot, humid climate of Central and South America, and European colonists kept planting and planting. Coffee trees went in as fast as workers could clear the land — so many of them, in fact, that coffee beans, through a sudden abundance of supply, became affordable for ordinary Westerners. The colonists considered it the perfect cash crop for the New World, and they convinced the natives that coffee cultivation would act as a social motor and propel them to European-style prosperity. Three centuries later, the populace is still waiting for the payoff. They have little choice. Coffee is both the hand that feeds Latin America and the noose around its neck.
A Day’s Work
The working conditions on the Americas’ first coffee plantations were horrific, and Brazil swiftly emerged as the market leader, not just in production but in brutality toward its labor force. Like de Clieu’s stealth mission, the story of the bean’s journey to Brazil is another entertaining (but much shorter) coffee legend. In the late 1720s, the French and the Dutch jealously guarded their Latin American coffee plantations, hoping to prevent other powers — especially the Portuguese — from getting a piece of the market over in the Brazilian territory. But in 1727, they let down their guard. The two needed a third party to help resolve a border dispute between French Guiana and Dutch Guiana (now Suriname), so they invited Brazil’s Lt. Col. Francisco de Melo Palheta to act as a mediator. Palheta, it turned out, had an even greater gift for subterfuge than de Clieu; while he was supposedly fostering peace between the French and the Dutch, he was also (ahem) achieving harmony with the French governor’s wife. And after the two nations reached an agreement, she bestowed on Palheta a farewell gift: a bouquet of flowers, with coffee seedlings hidden inside.
Unfortunately, this is just about the only lighthearted anecdote one can tell about Brazil’s early coffee cultivation. Over the next 150-odd years, Brazil imported more than three million slaves to work the country’s coffee fazendas, nearly five times the estimated number of slaves the United States brought in over its entire history. These slaves endured grueling seventeen-hour workdays, with their masters granting breaks only to sing prayers and sleep in locked dormitories. Because of this daily ordeal, the slaves’ average life expectancy from the moment they set foot in Brazil was just seven years. The coffee-slave bond defined the country; as a member of Brazil’s parliament pronounced in 1880, “Brazil is coffee, and coffee is the negro.” By the time Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the country’s coffee hegemony was indisputable. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Brazil produced five times as much coffee as the rest of the world’s countries combined.
Coffee growers are better off today, but the nature of their work remains much the same: the world’s best beans are still sown and harvested by hand on remote equatorial farms, just as they were centuries ago. It’s tough work, performed in some of the world’s most difficult terrain — sheer mountainsides, teeming rain forests — but it couldn’t be any other way. Arabica, the strain of coffee that accounts for two thirds of the world’s beans (and all of the good ones), is a remarkably finicky plant. If the temperature varies too much from sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, it aborts; if the ground it rests in gets less than four or five inches of rain per month, it wilts; if you try to plant it at an altitude lower than four thousand feet above sea level — you get the idea. For the diva-ish arabica plant, only lush, mountainous, tropical regions will do. In other words, coffee likes to grow in areas that are a complete hassle to reach — Indiana Jones territory. “In places like Colombia and Africa, you have to travel along these very bad roads with thousand-foot dropoffs on the side to get to coffee country,” said Dave Olsen, the Starbucks coffee expert. “The thing I’m probably most thankful for is that I didn’t end up rolling down some steep mountainside.”
During the harvest season in Latin America, which begins at different times of year depending on altitude, workers of all ages flock to the plantati
ons to pick coffee cherries. Migrant workers walk for days to take part. Children work alongside their parents and grandparents to help defray the cost of school supplies, a fact that has sparked outrage from some industry critics, who have accused Starbucks and its rivals of supporting “child labor.” The kids certainly work, but not everyone considers it a bad thing; for rural children in Latin America, working with your family to harvest coffee is as much a part of growing up as naptime or Little League is in America. “No one ever thought of it as ‘child labor’ or anything,” explained Martin Diedrich, who grew up on a coffee farm in Guatemala. “My brother and I had to work on the farm every day. If there was no work on my farm, Dad would make us go to the neighbor’s farm, and we’d work at local wages. It was just what you did to get by.”
The child-labor charge is a good example of our tendency to assume we know the score about coffee farms in the developing world and are thus entitled to proclaim what’s best for growers. Even those who work extensively with the farmers themselves are sometimes prone to embarrassing gaffes. For instance, Rebecca Wagner of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, a Vermont-based company that sells large quantities of Fair Trade coffee, recalled showing a farmer the artwork on one of Green Mountain’s Fair Trade coffee packages; it depicted a worker happily placing coffee cherries in a wicker basket. “He looked at it and said, ‘That basket is huge!’ ” Wagner told me, laughing. “He said they could never carry that much at once — which I guess just shows that we don’t know anything.”
Journalists and other white-collar types who get a chance to work in the fields as a coffee picker typically express surprise at how exhausting it is to pluck little berries all day. Since coffee has always been such a cheap and ubiquitous commodity, maybe we just assume the trees down in Latin America are filled with gleaming, full coffee cans. But producing a raw coffee bean actually entails a great deal of labor. Let’s say you’re a typical American coffee drinker, clocking in at about twenty pounds of roasted beans consumed per year. * Keeping this buzz alive requires the full yield of twenty coffee trees (a mature tree only ends up producing one pound of roasted beans per year), each of which demands hours of cultivating, fertilizing, pruning, and so forth. The vast majority of the tree’s output actually goes to waste. When we speak of coffee “beans,” after all, what we’re referring to are the seeds of coffee cherries — round, vivid red fruits the size of large blueberries, which grow in clusters around the tree’s branches.
While we’re clearing things up, this “tree” really looks more like a stout shrub, covered top to bottom in slim, dark green leaves. Though they can grow more than thirty feet tall in the wild, coffee plants are kept at around seven feet on farms for ease of harvesting. Ideally, taller trees will shield the coffee shrubs from the full strength of the sun’s rays, for reasons of quality and environmental health. This is why the “shade-grown” designation has become a hot one. Coffee producers, always looking to boost yields, long ago discovered that sun-drenched coffee plants produce significantly more berries, albeit at a cost to overall quality. But the environmental consequences of this practice are considerable. Sun-grown coffee leaches nutrients out of the soil much faster than shade-grown plants, spoiling the land and triggering erosion. Plus, the more forest canopy farmers remove, the worse things get for the migrating birds who need a place to lodge for the winter. (So to answer the question from the beginning of this chapter, “shade-grown” and “bird-friendly” coffee are fundamentally the same thing.)
Making the seeds from these coffee trees palatable takes finesse; any missteps result in rancid coffee. First, the berries must be harvested at their peak ripeness. At dawn each morning during the harvest season, pickers set out through the mountain mists into the fields, wicker canastas strapped to their waists. They search for deep crimson-colored cherries, rapidly plucking them off and dropping them in the basket; they’re paid at the end of the day according to how many baskets they’ve filled. (On the massive coffee plantations in Brazil, h-owever, mechanized coffee harvesters that look like soccer goals on wheels harvest the unripe cherries along with the ripe and just weed out the offenders later on.) Each coffee berry contains a double-sided seed — which splits into two beans — underneath a layer of sweet pulp. Farmhands wash the cherries to sift out twigs and leaves, send the fruit through pulping machines to extract the hard seeds, and spread the beans onto vast concrete patios to dry under the sun. Twice an hour, workers rake the beans to make sure they dry evenly. After a week or two of this treatment, they pour the raw, pale green beans into sixty-kilogram burlap sacks, ready for sale to the coffee roasters.
In the 2005–2006 crop year, the globe’s coffee plantations generated 14.3 billion pounds of coffee beans in this way. Tropical developing nations supplied almost all of it, while temperate, industrialized nations consumed 80 percent of it. To put it bluntly, poor countries grow coffee for rich ones. Over the past three centuries, this relationship has remained unchanged; the “social motor” that the coffee industry supposedly represented never revved up. Although the plantations are no longer overseen by European colonists, there might as well still be a patronage system. A small army of middlemen — importers, shippers, exporters, and local coffee “coyotes” (or bosses) — each take their cut from the farmer’s sale price, leaving growers broke and powerless to change things. Because they generally have no access to credit, farmers can’t even raise the cash to escape the cycle. And if they go hungry, their cash crop won’t help. You can’t eat coffee.
Dozens of generations of coffee production have taught farmers from Honduras to Rwanda how to cope with this difficult way of life. But not even the most resilient among them can survive the lowest coffee prices in history, which reached their current depths courtesy of a very unlikely culprit: Vietnam.
Free-Market Freefall
When the head of the organization dedicated to improving the lot of coffee farmers throws his hands up in frustration while discussing how best to carry out his job, you might call that a bad sign. But Néstor Oso-rio has every right to be aggravated. Consumers around the world are racing to pay preposterous amounts of money for a cup of coffee, yet growers are struggling as never before. When he tries to suggest simple, painless ways to help these millions of people not starve, the governments of the First World nations that are buying the incredibly cheap raw coffee refuse to obstruct free trade.
The whole problem seems almost nonsensical: if I pay ten dollars for a pound of coffee, how could the farmer who produced it possibly get that measly 41.5-cent average? * In part, that’s just the wacky way the free market works, but there’s a political angle to the crisis as well. The source of the growers’ current predicament lies in the sometimes brutal intersection of power politics and the open market.
Things weren’t always so volatile for farmers; in fact, the ICO once administered a deal between producing and consuming nations to guarantee a stable price for growers. But it needed a dictator’s help to pull this off. Back in the 1950s, conditions for coffee producers stood roughly where they do today: in a state of chaos, with the fates of millions depending on the whims of the weather. A single frost in Brazil, which happens reliably every few years, would spark a buying panic, doubling prices overnight. Bumper coffee crops would cause massive gluts, sending prices plummeting because of reduced demand while sacks of coffee rotted in ware-houses. It was like pegging the value of coffee to a Super Ball on the loose, and the exhausted producers clamored to put an end to it. Surely, a quota agreement would make more sense for everyone, they said — one that would serve growers by letting them control the amount of beans entering the market (thereby avoiding surpluses), and buyers by ensuring a stable coffee supply. The idea didn’t fly because of one major dissenter: the United States, buyer of a quarter of the world’s beans, which didn’t want to impede the free market.
Fidel Castro made the United States reconsider. In 1959, Castro rose to power in Cuba, establishing the first Communist state in the Weste
rn Hemisphere. Three years later, after he helped terrify America with the prospect of nuclear assault during the Cuban missile crisis, U.S. leaders realized they had to do something to stop other impoverished Latin American nations from turning to Communism. Senator Hubert Humphrey declared in 1962 that maintaining stable coffee prices was “a matter of life and death,” adding that “Castroism will spread like a plague through Latin America unless something is done about the prices of raw materials produced there.”
Suddenly filled with this brotherly spirit, the United States and other consuming nations agreed to the first International Coffee Agreement that same year; the ICO was created to oversee the accord. For three decades, farmers got a stable price for their crop, and the major coffee brands had little to worry about besides their expensive ad campaigns. “The big companies like Nestlé were supportive of the quota system because they knew in October of each year exactly how much coffee would be available and what the price would be,” Osorio told me. “The administrators loved it. They could just go off and play tennis at three in the afternoon. It was a well-organized world.”
In 1989, this world came crashing down along with the Berlin Wall. Suddenly, the cold war was over — the threat of Communism had passed. With no fledgling Castros to worry about, the United States abruptly pulled out of the ICA. By 1992, coffee prices had plunged 50 percent. Three years later, a Brazilian frost tripled prices. The free market was restored.
As if things weren’t bad enough already, the ghost of the cold war had one last trick to play on coffee farmers. The highest profile battleground in America’s war on Communism, of course, was Vietnam. By the midnineties, Osorio explained, developed nations were acknowledging that they owed a “moral debt” to Vietnam, which they decided to pay off (through the World Bank) with funding for agriculture. And how did the Viet-nam-ese government elect to use this cash? To plant coffee, which, as the discerning reader knows by now, is about as likely to yield widespread happiness as plowing one’s life savings into a slot machine. With coffee prices temporarily high because of a frost, Viet-nam-ese officials naively encouraged their citizens to plant as many coffee trees as possible.