[Marxism] Coffee

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

washingtonpost.com
Jonathan Yardley

By Jonathan Yardley
Sunday, July 10, 2005; BW02

COFFEE

A Dark History

By Antony Wild

Norton. 323 pp. $25.95

Antony Wild isn't kidding. The history of coffee is indeed as "dark," as 
his subtitle puts it, as the cup of Colombian that sits on my desk as these 
words are written. Himself a coffee lover and an expert on the subject -- 
he worked for more than a decade as the buyer for a prestigious British 
specialty-coffee company -- Wild is nonetheless no sentimentalist when it 
comes to the human and natural toll the bean has extracted -- "poverty, 
violence, exploitation, environmental devastation, political oppression, 
and corruption" -- nor to the threats that caffeine poses to the health of 
those who consume it. As he writes, with the wry touch that makes his book 
a pleasure:

"Nature has so ordered things that the highest levels of caffeine are to be 
found in the most important part of its plant, its seed. This is because 
caffeine is nothing more than a natural insecticide, and the high caffeine 
levels protect the seed from unwanted attention. Hapless insects who ingest 
too much find that their nervous systems go into overdrive. By the miracle 
of international trade, the same symptoms can be observed in office workers 
the world over."

However harmful caffeine may be -- a question on which the jury is still 
out, though Wild argues that "science produced by the coffee industry" 
glosses over and/or distorts its effects -- the buzz it produces has had a 
significant influence on human history. So Wild argues, and his case is 
persuasive. He is unable to trace coffee's beginnings to a precise point -- 
it is commonly understood to have originated in Ethiopia, and "it would 
appear that the Sufis were the first to adopt coffee drinking," in Yemen in 
the late 15th century -- but once he reaches the 16th century and the rise 
of coffeehouses in the Ottoman Empire, things start to fall into place.

The role of the coffeehouse, he argues, simply cannot be underestimated. In 
the Arab world it "was, other than the reviled tavern, the only place to 
meet friends outside the home, discuss politics and literature, play 
backgammon or chess and perhaps gamble," and thus it became "an integral 
part of the imperial system, providing a forum for the coming together and 
dissemination of news and ideas." When coffee arrived in Europe in the next 
century, the same development occurred. People who "had been accustomed to 
swilling considerable quantities of weak beer throughout the day," and were 
thus inclined to be phlegmatic and woozy, now were energized by caffeine, 
setting off "a revolution in . . . political, economic, and cultural life." 
Wild writes:

"It is almost impossible to distinguish the cultural effects of the coffee 
house from the physical effects of the coffee served in it. The environment 
of the 'Penny University' undoubtedly encouraged a degree of association 
between men who might otherwise never have met, but would they have formed 
societies without the intellectually stimulating nature of the beverage? It 
has been argued that, until the arrival of coffee, the population of Europe 
had existed in a constant state of mild intoxication, since the quality of 
water was such that many people drank the weak beers of the time morning, 
noon, and night. By switching to coffee, they were not only reducing the 
muddle-headedness resulting from alcohol consumption, but also ingesting a 
powerful new drug. Indeed, it could be said that the introduction of coffee 
to England led to a . . . 'brain explosion.' "

The list of British institutions that had their origins in coffeehouses is 
indeed impressive. It includes Lloyds of London, the Stock Exchange, the 
East India Company and the Royal Society, "which was to become the most 
illustrious scientific institution of the age." This was "the key 
contribution of coffee house culture to Britain," with remarkable 
ramifications: "That these societies consolidated into institutions that 
were no longer based in coffee houses reflects their evolutionary success 
and the adaptability of the coffee house culture, which could inspire the 
creation of august commercial institutions . . . , a magazine such as the 
Spectator , the first use of the ballot box, the Royal Society, 
Freemasonry, and the police force."

This creature whom Wild calls "Coffee House Man: energetic, self-motivated, 
political, practical, reformist, well-connected, cultured, and 
philanthropic," changed much more than England. Revolutions in the American 
colonies and then in France traced much of their origins to coffeehouse 
palavering; indeed, wherever coffee was and is drunk its influence has been 
nothing short of spectacular. Caffeine -- whether in coffee or tea or in 
the "so-called 'energy' [soft] drinks which were heavily caffeinated" -- is 
the fuel that drives the world, as one need look no farther than the 
nearest coffee line at an office cafeteria to see.

Like so much else in human life, in other words, coffee giveth and coffee 
taketh away. Its sensory pleasures are undeniable (though not easily found 
in a world where most coffee is mediocre or worse), and its energizing 
powers are formidable. So, too, is its place in the international economy. 
The World Bank "estimates that a staggering 500 million people globally are 
involved directly or indirectly in the coffee trade," only a tiny number of 
whom are getting wealthy in the process. Mostly coffee is grown, harvested 
and processed by subsistence laborers and farmers, producing coffee "at the 
lowest possible cost for markets in the developed world." Wild, who views 
this "colonialism" with what can only be called anger, minces few words:

"Instead of living by the old maxim that 'Trade follows the flag,' powerful 
corporations have realized that it is easier to dispense with the 
burdensome responsibilities of actual colonization, and use modern 
transnational organizations such as the [World Trade Organization], the 
World Bank and the [International Monetary Fund] to impose their will from 
the boardrooms of Manhattan, Paris, and Berlin. For the impoverished farmer 
whose national politics bend to the needs of these transnational 
institutions and the corporations they serve, the notion of democracy is a 
spurious validation of the yoke under which they are forced to work."

No matter where one looks, the coffee picture is not pretty. When it was 
introduced to the Western Hemisphere in the 18th century, the common 
feature in all the countries where it flourished -- Jamaica, Cuba, 
Guatemala, Peru, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Mexico -- was "that they had large 
existing slave populations that enabled coffee growing to be established 
with startling rapidity." The huge plantations of Brazil were "founded on 
the continuation of slavery long after it had been banned in Europe." In 
1880, one member of Parliament said, "Brazil is coffee, and coffee is the 
negro." Eight years later, Brazil finally banned slavery, but the 
conditions under which the ostensibly freed laborers worked barely changed.

Coffee is now huge in Vietnam, "the second largest producer of coffee 
worldwide" after Brazil, which is -- at least for the moment -- good for 
Vietnam, but according to Wild its "massive increase [in production] has 
been blamed for the global collapse of coffee prices." There are also 
"unsubstantiated but persistent rumours concerning possible dioxin 
contamination of the coffee crop, a legacy of the widespread spraying of 
Agent Orange by the Americans during the Vietnam War. Vietnam is the 
country where coffee's dark history has come home to roost with a vengeance."

Et cetera. Like sugar (see Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power: The Place of 
Sugar in Modern History ), cotton and many other agricultural products that 
are grown to serve the global market, coffee has a long history of 
exploitation and abuse of resources both human and natural. The indignation 
with which Antony Wild tells its story is well founded, and so too is the 
sorrow: "Coffee used to be a business in which, despite its manifest 
drawbacks, a man could think himself honourably employed. In common with 
many other businessmen, the coffee man as often as not now finds himself 
effectively a receiver of stolen goods and an enslaver of the Third World. 
The more conscientious may scratch their heads and wonder how on earth this 
came about. Most keep their conscience prisoner." ·


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