Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity

by H. E. Jacob

  “Now we need merely follow the coast to Santos,” explained Sutter, the pilot. From time to time he came to visit me in the cabin, for a talk. He had been a German officer, in the flying corps, and had gone to Rio as soon as the war was over to become a professional airman there. He was pilot of the Fraternidado, one of the Condor Syndicate’s air-fleet. Once a week he flew south, to Santos and Florianopolis; and once a week north, to Bahia, Pernambuco, and Natal.

  I pointed to the cottony clouds: “Oughtn’t we to be in sight of Santos by now?”

  No answer. But the smell he had spoken of assailed my nostrils. An aromatic yet pungent odour was rising from beneath and permeated the cabin. Stronger than the wind, and swifter than our speed. It was the smell of burning coffee, a smell so concentrated that it dulled the senses, and was at the same time actually painful.

  The ship volplaned down to fifteen hundred feet. The clouds divided. Between the parted masses we saw green land, with here and there bright yellow patches, from which smoke rose.

  “Those are fires,” I said.

  “Yes, they are burning coffee!” replied airman Sutter, wrathfully.

  The smell by now had become intolerable, and the fumes had produced a ringing in my ears. It seemed to sap my strength. For a while I felt as if we were flying through the noise made by a gigantic alarm-clock. Then we passed the fire-zone, and fresh air blew in through the windows once more. We could see the hills that surround the harbour of Santos, and the rows of neat, white houses in the town.

  “Well, I must make the landing myself,” said Sutter. Through the speaking-tube he called to the mechanic, a Portuguese half-breed, who thereupon left the driver’s seat. Sutter took the man’s place, and five minutes later we settled down softly upon the waters of the harbour.

  We were seated on a terrace overlooking the sea. Above us shone an arc-lamp, thickly surrounded by swarms of flying creatures, beetles, ants, and moths.

  The sea was groaning rather than roaring. Very dark, like the ocean of a nightmare, it stretched away towards the east. The restlessness of the water communicated itself to the land. How sultry was this starless night! Sutter and I were reclining in a pair of folding long-chairs. The wood and the linen seemed to sweat. Sutter was smoking, and this helped to keep off the insects. I wanted to remove the atmosphere of depression by a comforting dose of whisky and soda. A bottle of a well-known brand stood on the table, a tower filled with fluid repose and radiating British phlegm. After we had clinked glasses and drunk, we felt more at ease.

  “Well, what do you think of this coffee-burning business? Would you have believed such a thing to be possible?” asked Sutter.

  “I read about it before I left Europe,” was my answer, “but, I may tell you frankly, it seemed to me incredible. How large an area was covered by the bonfires?”

  “What we flew over today? Ten kilometres, at least. It may have been fifteen.”

  “Past belief!”

  “Well, you know, from Santos alone they brought millions of sacks, emptied them, and fired the whole lot. Disgusting. It has been going on for months.”

  I took another drink.

  “It’s no concern of mine, after all,” said Sutter, in an outburst. “I was brought up as a soldier, and now I am a professional air-pilot. But what gets my goat is the illogicality of the whole thing. Here they are burning coffee to rid themselves of it, while in Europe many poor devils of starvelings cannot afford to buy themselves a cup of coffee! “

  “You think that the, coffee ought to be given away to those who are in need?”

  “I’m not such a dunderhead as that,” answered Sutter. “Before the coffee could be given away in Europe, someone would have to pay for the transportation. How could the cost be defrayed except by the coffee itself, by coffee becoming a saleable commodity once more, instead of being a drug in the market?”

  “Yes,” said I, “man’s sublimest power, that of bestowing gifts, has no place in economic life. What is given away freely has, thereby, lost its value as a saleable commodity.”

  “Can you understand that?” asked Sutter, in astonishment.

  “‘Understand’ is not the right word. All I know is that such is the fact.”

  The air-pilot emitted two or three puffs of smoke. Next he took a pull at his glass of whisky and soda.

  I laughed. Then a whimsical thought came into my head. “Do you remember the witches’ multiplication-table in the first part of Faust?”

  He nodded. “More or less. ‘Twice one is four, and carry two makes seven. Add one is ten, you’ll all be rich men.’ Something of that sort, wasn’t it?”

  “More or less,” I said, with a laugh. “Well, listen carefully. That’s the multiplication-table that they use today in the world markets—a perfectly logical one. No difficulty, now, in understanding why there are bonfires of coffee here at Santos.”

  He sat up and stared at me, saying: “Are you drunk?”

  “Not so fast. I only wanted to show you that you were wrong when you said that the illogicality of the coffee-burning business revolted you. It is disgusting, as you say, but perfectly logical.”

  “I suppose,” said Sutter sarcastically, “that you are going to quote old Hegel next. Whatever is, is rational’?”

  “Unfortunately Hegel was right. Let me tell you a story, a fable, rather, that is told in Europe today to all students of economics. They call it the ‘law of marginal utility.’“

  “Go ahead,” said Sutter. “But you’re not going to pull my leg, are you?”

  “Oh, no, my fable is perfectly serious.”

  “Well, let me hear it,” said the pilot.

  “A man has five sacks of grain. He uses the first to appease the pangs of hunger; the second, to produce complete satiety; the third, as fodder for cattle; the fourth, to make strong drinks; the fifth, to feed racehorses. Has each sack the same value? If the man reflects a little, he will realize that every sack has a different value, a value that varies according to its use. The value of the first sack, which was used to allay second sack, by four; that of the last sack by one. But since the man has all five sacks simultaneously at his disposal, he estimates their value as equal, and at the value of the last sack, at the value of what is called ‘marginal utility.’ Each sack, therefore, is worth one. All the sacks taken together are worth five times one. That is to say five.”

  “Well, isn’t that true?” asked Sutter. “Do you mean to say that five times one is not five?”

  “Not in all circumstances. I shall make that clear to you in a moment. Suppose that the man in our fable loses one of his sacks? What will he do? He will stop keeping race-horses. The remaining four sacks have risen in value, to the marginal value of the sack used for making strong drinks, which was worth two. Now the four sacks together have the value of four times two, which is eight. Thus the quantity of grain has diminished, but its value has increased.”

  “The devil it has!” said Sutter. “My head is swimming. Is that really true?”

  “It is really true! Now, surely you can understand, however much you may dislike the fact, why the value of coffee increases when large quantities of coffee are ruthlessly destroyed!”

  The airman’s sides shook with laughter. “Yes, but what about the air, the air, the air?”

  “What has the air got to do with the matter?” I inquired.

  “Why, if what you say is true of coffee, do you mean to imply that man’s chief good, air, has no economic value? Certainly it has no value when the supply of it is unrestricted. But when there is a shortage, as for instance in a submarine, it becomes valuable, doesn’t it? It grows more valuable the less there is of it.” He smacked his thigh in his amusement.

  “I congratulate you, Herr Sutter! You have grasped the root of the matter.”

  “And is that the sort of stuff they teach students of economics?”

  “Yes. More than fifty years ago, a psychological trend came to the front in political economy. The leaders were Gossen, a
German, and William Jevons, an Englishman. Then the Austrians took a hand in the game, Karl Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Friedrich von Wieser contributing so notably to the development of the theory that one speaks now of the ‘Austrian School’“

  “And what are the teachings of this Austrian School?”

  “The theory of marginal utility. A diminution of quantity signifies an increase in value. Four sacks of grain are worth more than five, because . . . but need I repeat?”

  Sutter, the air-pilot, struck the table, so that the whisky-bottle tottered and the glasses jingled. “No, you do not need to say it all over again, for I have had enough!” he said angrily. “What the professors teach may be extremely reasonable. But at the same time it is rank nonsense, because it ignores the common sense and the morality of the plain man. Those who sharpen their wits too much, lose them. To be over-subtle is to be stupid, my dear sir. The world at large will never be the fenced precinct or the desert island of the professors of economics.”

  Out of the sultry seacoast air of Santos, I took a train next day to the plateau of São Paulo. There it was as bright and fresh as it had been when we were flying high on the way from Rio to Santos. That evening, while the jazz-band was braying in the hotel lounge—where the company looked as smart as in Paris or Trouville or St. Moritz, though their skins were somewhat darker—the head-porter asked me, in a whisper: “Would you like to see a quemada?”

  “A quemada? What is that?”

  “You know, sir, don’t you, that coffee is being burned wholesale? I can get you a taxi, and you can see it yourself, at half an hour’s drive from the town.”

  “Why are you making such a mystery of the matter? Are spectators forbidden?”

  “No, sir, there is no prohibition. Still, the government is not best pleased for European visitors to see what is going on. I know well enough why. In Europe, coffee is dear, and foreigners grow angry to see us burn it here as worthless.”

  After thinking for a moment, I asked: “Are there many police there?”

  “Not more than four or five gendarmes. The quemada do café is of no interest to us Brazilians.”

  “I should have thought,” said I, astonished, “that there would have been people ready to carry off the coffee destined for the flames. It seems to me strange if there are not,”

  I was watching the porter’s face, and saw that he regarded my observation as “strange.” Whose thoughts were topsy-turvy, those of Brazilians, or those of Europeans? “None of us Brazilians take any interest in the matter.” The whole thing was an enigma. The South American continent was an enigma with its perilous wealth which, if left unregulated, could transform itself into grievous poverty.

  I accepted the porter’s offer, and drove out to see the quemada. Our route led by a fine road through garden suburbs. We reached a square, the farther side of which was bounded by a big shed. The sort of shed you might have seen anywhere in Europe, with a tar-paper roof. From within came a sputtering and sizzling noise. There was a smell of burning, but no smell of coffee. I could not see any flame.

  The chauffeur entered the shed and came out again accompanied by a gendarme. He told the latter that I wanted to see the burning. The gendarme looked at me indifferently, and said I might go a few paces inside. I paid off the chauffeur, who did not wish to wait, lest he might “get into trouble.” The gendarme opened the door of the shed, and, pointing with his rifle, showed how far I could advance.

  Thus I reached the edge of the quemada. The roof of the shed had been removed over the part where I now stood, and I looked into a vast space filled with smoke-wreaths—a Pythian space, which, for all one could see, might have extended for two kilometres or for twenty.

  The fumes were not white only, but black and reddish as well. I stretched forward my hands. It was like thrusting them into an oven. The place was an inferno, although flames flickered only fitfully here and there. A sinister region, where doomed spirits hovered, talking in a tongue no mortal could understand.

  Strange indeed was the noise. The note of the conflagration was not such a roar as one hears when a huge house is burning in the open, and the flames rise freely into the sky. Since above the vast heap of coffee there were no bellying fires, that sort of music was not to be heard. The auto-da-fé of the glutted coffee had something sinister about it, a smack of furtive malice. The sound of the burning reminded me of the noise made by bees when their hive is smoked; it was a crafty, whining, chattering noise. The glow hugged the ground, as if tormented by an uneasy conscience. Because combustion was not free, the odour was offensive, that of matter being charred until it becomes black and irrecognizable.

  Not all the time, however. While I was standing in front of this forsaken pyre, suddenly the wind found entry, and blew the stinking vapours aside. Then there was an ethereal odour. That always happens when the flames attack a new heap. At first they roast the beans instead of destroying them. The necromantic smell of the oil liberated in the roasting process, this aroma of Araby, was what brought tears to my eyes and a lump into my throat. For, properly speaking, to roast coffee is to effect the first transformation through which it passes on the way to become something that comforts the human nervous system in so mysterious a fashion. Now, however, what I witnessed was a coffee-roasting that was only a prelude to destruction.

  Here the odour had become Satanic. It was the odour that I had smelt for the first time when visiting the Berlin Industrial Exhibition of 1896, and that I have loved ever since. There a cylindrical machine, invented by John Arbuckle, was on show. Wonderful, to me, was this roasting-drum, in which, by opening a flap, one could watch how far the process had advanced. Some of the coffees that were being roasted were of very light colour, others were medium-brown, and others dark-brown. I envied the employees who were demonstrating the use of the machine, and who lived in the hot vapours that rose from the roasting beans. Now, however, I should have preferred that the coffee perish amid a hideous stench rather than amid this beloved aroma.

  I had already turned to quit the shed, when a loud crackling arrested my attention. It sounded like a machine-gun. Were some rebels attacking the quemada? Oh, no, nothing of that sort. In one of the heaps of burning coffee, the beans were exploding. For a minute or two, sparks flew in every direction. They looked like fireflies, describing little parabolas athwart the greyish-black fumes. Soon it was all over, the last chemical revolt against destruction had been crushed. Now the beans had been reduced to charcoal; they had suffered the inevitable death whose germs slumber in all living creatures.

  I took my departure. The street along which I walked ran between the high walls of gardens, walls overtopped by huge cactuses, by pines, and by eucalyptus trees. How cool the night was on this plateau. Where the coffee was burning, smoke had hidden the stars. Now they were sparkling abundantly in the clear sky. Yet not so abundantly as in our northern hemisphere; the fertility of the southern soil has not been communicated to the southern skies. I recognized some of the constellations: the Southern Cross, the Centaur, the Compasses.

  Then, looking at the zenith, I descried the two dark areas that are known as the “coal-sacks.” These are like black pits in the firmament, pits where no star shines.

  An Indian passed me. He was wearing blue overalls, open in front down to the navel. The man went by without a greeting. He was lean of visage, and walked stiffly, barefooted, so that his feet made no sound.

  I turned to follow him with my eyes, as he glided towards the shed. Was he the night-watchman’s relief? His raiment and his bare feet suggested extreme poverty. Perhaps he hoped to steal some of the un-burned coffee?

  No, that was unlikely. Coffee was too cheap in Brazil to be worth stealing. Everyone could get as much as he wanted for nothing. What did it matter to the poor of Brazil that the poor of Europe could not buy coffee because the price was kept up by these bonfires?

  Most Brazilians shrug their shoulders when you speak to them of the quemada. All the same, they look at this coffe
e-burning askance, for simple folk are not pleased by the destruction of commodities produced by their comrades’ labour. The ill-feeling, however, does not take a violent form. I had been told that a very few policemen sufficed, in Santos, to guard the barges into which coffee is shovelled in order to be dumped out at sea.

  “Nevertheless,” I said in conversation next day, “there must be persons who disapprove of these bonfires and of this dumping? I do not mean poor folk, who are comparatively indifferent to what happens. I am thinking of members of the intelligentzia, who cannot fail to regard the destruction of the coffee crop by governmental action as a grave economic problem.”

  I was talking to Carlos Hennig, an elderly German merchant, who settled in Brazil forty years ago.

  “Of course there are some such. For instance, the liberals, who are opposed on principle to state interference with the interplay of supply and demand. I may mention Alves de Lima. He is one of the wealthiest men in the country, belonging to the old Portuguese stock, and he has written a fierce invective against this form of state intervention.”

  “Do you think I could have a talk with him?”

  “He runs a newspaper in São Paulo. I will ring him up on the phone.”

  In a few minutes Carlos Hennig came back to me. Alves de Lima was not in São Paulo. He had gone to his country house, which lay amid extensive coffee-plantations, not far from Campinas.

  “Where is Campinas?” I asked, and was glad to learn from Hennig that I could get there without spending several days in an airplane. As distances go in Brazil, it was close at hand, only sixty-five miles northwest of São Paulo. I could reach it in an hour or two by rail.

  Next day we took train across the “terra roxa.” The railway ran among dark-green plantations. The coffee-shrubs looked to me like dwarf trees rather than big bushes. With their abundant foliage they formed a huge green carpet stretching to the horizon. The whole countryside was a green garden. Where roads crossed the green, one saw the earth, chocolate-red, sometimes almost violet in tint. Dark-green and dark-red were the “national colours” of the coffee-state São Paulo.