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

by Mark Pendergrast

  Those computers were donated by a charity and were still unusual in the coffee world, but there is no question that rural farmers are becoming more savvy not only about cupping, but also about finding information about prices and markets on the Internet or through cell phones. Coyotes—the pejorative name given to local opportunists who buy coffee beans at ridiculously low prices—have less success when farmers know what their beans are worth on the New York market or to a particular roaster.129

  The Threat of Global Warming

  Even as the coffee world is flattening in one way, it is climbing higher peaks. Because of climate change, some farmers have begun to move coffee plantings up mountain slopes in Central America. Eventually, that will mean less square footage as the cone narrows, but agronomist Daniel Urena of the Coopedota Coffee Cooperative in Costa Rica told a reporter in 2008 that he was pleased about the trend. “We can now plant at 2,000 meters (6,562 feet),” Urena said. Normally, seedlings didn’t survive above 1,800 meters. The higher the elevation, the higher quality the strictly hard beans would be.

  In Peru, farmers weren’t so happy. “The seasons are changing tremendously,” reported Cesar Rivas, president of the national growers’ group, in 2008. “You can no longer say winter is in November, December or March. It falls in other months sometimes. This is generating complete productive disorder.” The usual Peruvian coffee harvest began in April, a half year before most harvesting elsewhere, giving it a seasonal advantage. The Peruvian growers also blamed global warming for the scarcity of rain that year.

  Coffee Kids and Other Ways to Help

  In 1988 coffee retailer Bill Fishbein visited small coffee farmers in Guatemala. Though appalled by their living conditions, he found that “they were living vibrant lives in poverty, with a sense of community and a spirit that is absent in our own lives.” Fishbein returned to the United States determined to help coffee-farming families, creating Coffee Kids to address one of the primary causes of poverty in those communities: an over-reliance on coffee.

  Each year millions of families count on the coffee harvest for their economic survival; for the majority it is not enough. Coffee Kids provides funding to create communities that offer greater economic options, improved access to health care and education, and increased food security. By injecting life into local economies, families can diversify their income and continue farming coffee without total dependence on it.

  Fishbein retired from Coffee Kids in 2008, but the organization continued under the guidance of executive director Carolyn Fairman. In 2009, Coffee Kids worked with sixteen organizations in Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Peru. Projects included microcredit and savings, organic gardening and small animal production, training center development, scholarships, and health awareness programs.

  Similarly, Vermont-based Grounds for Health set up clinics in coffee-growing regions of Central America to test for and treat cervical cancer, a major problem among women in remote areas. The nonprofit is supported by coffee roasters and consumers. The Gates Foundation, concerned primarily with public health, realized that poor health and poverty were intimately associated with coffee. It gave $47 million in 2007 to help East African coffee farmers improve their beans’ quality.

  The Café Femenino Foundation began in 2004 with Peruvian women creating their own coffee blend of that name. The foundation also helps empower women in coffee-growing regions elsewhere, working to improve economic conditions, health, and educational opportunities as well as providing assistance in times of crisis. In Los Cacaos, Dominican Republic, for instance, Café Femenino helped women to diversity the produce on their small farms by adding passion fruit crops.

  Since women are fundamental to coffee culture both at origin and destination, the International Women’s Coffee Alliance was founded in 2003 to promote networking, mentorship, and training. In addition to the United States, the organization has active chapters in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. The IWCA aims to make a difference in the lives of a million women in coffee by 2016.

  Cup for Education, created in 2003, specializes in building schools in remote coffee-growing regions of Central and Latin America. The organization also helps fund teachers and provides textbooks, backpacks, notebooks, and pencils. “How can they improve their coffees if they cannot read, write an agricultural report, study the weather, or understand the fundamentals of the coffee trade?” asks the Cup for Education Web site.

  On an individual level, in Bremerton, Washington, Eric Harrison, a former Peace Corps volunteer, imports Honduran beans he calls Eco Café in order to fund improved water safety programs in Honduras. Airline pilot Trevor Slavick has founded Little Feet Coffee Company (“Coffee with a Kick”) to fund soccer equipment for children on fincas.

  Mending the Heart with Organic

  Gary Talboy of Coffee Bean International pioneered the certification and marketing of organic coffee in the mid-1980s, working with Tom Harding of the Organic Crop Improvement Association (OCIA) to certify coffee from Mexican and Guatemalan cooperatives.

  Organic coffee now has grown to 5 percent of the specialty market. At first, most organic coffee was pretty bad. It came from poverty-stricken smallholders whose coffee was organic by default, since they could not afford fertilizer or pesticide. They also took little care with proper pruning or processing. Over the years, however, organic coffee improved dramatically, thanks largely to the efforts of people such as San Diego business-woman Karen Cebreros.

  In 1989 Cebreros was diagnosed with a rare heart disease and was told that she would eventually need a transplant. Determined to live life to the fullest, she flew to South America to visit her brother-in-law in the remote Peruvian village of Tamborapa. “There was no running water, no electricity, but the people were so loving and happy and giving,” Cebreros recalled. They grew coffee, for which they received 8 cents a pound.

  Cebreros helped the Peruvians to improve their coffee and get it certified as organic. Today, with the premiums from organic coffee sales, Tamborapa has electricity, running water, telephones, bridges, roads, a school, and a laboratory to study coffee quality. “But they are still loving, happy, and giving,” Cebreros reported. Miraculously, her heart healed itself.

  Her company, Elan Organic, acted as a facilitator, working with local growers to improve quality and to help fill out the mountain of paperwork to become certified. In 2008 Elan was purchased by Neumann Kaffee Gruppe. “When we began, the questionnaires weren’t even available in Spanish, let alone indigenous languages,” Cebreros recalled. Many of the growers were illiterate, and they didn’t have the survey maps the OCIA and other certification agencies demanded. Nor did they have the hefty application fees, which Elan initially paid. To be certified, coffee must be inspected for three consecutive years to make sure it is chemical-free. The process costs from $5,000 to $30,000.

  Still, the effort has paid off for many cooperatives in Latin America, Indonesia, and Africa. Now there are hundreds of certified organic coffees. It is ironic that most truly organic coffees (for example, the majority of Ethiopia’s and Indonesia’s beans) can’t be sold as such, since they aren’t certified.

  Pesticides pose no threat to consumers, since they are applied to the cherries, which protect the inner seed. Then the heat of the roast drives off any chemical residue. Coffee is, however, one of the most heavily sprayed crops on earth, and most pesticides miss the intended target. For those concerned about the environment and the health of campesino laborers, organic coffee makes sense, and it assures growers a decent price for their product.

  Even certified organic coffee can cause terrible water pollution, however. For years, in the wet process, the fermented mucilage floated downstream, where its decomposition robbed the water of oxygen, killed fish and other wildlife, and smelled horrible. Two-thirds of the river pollution in Costa Rica’s Central Valley stemmed from coffee wastes until recent years, when stringent national legislation changed beneficio practices.

  Fortunately,
there are viable alternatives, some of which I witnessed on my Central American tour. At Guatemala’s Oriflama, coffee was depulped without water, the red-skinned pulp piled in a huge pit and sprinkled with lime. There, it slowly decomposed without the stench that accompanies the water-soaked pulp. After the controlled fermentation, the water used to loosen the mucilage was recycled until it made a thick soup, then discharged into a pit to create excellent fertilizer. Even the parchment was recycled, burned to fire the dryers.

  Later, at a Honduran coffee research facility, I saw what California red worms could do to coffee pulp, transforming it in three months to rich soil. I also saw tiny African parasitic wasps that provided biological control for broca, the coffee borer.

  Coffee Ecotourism

  I stayed at an ecological coffee resort in Matagalpa, Nicaragua, run by Eddy and Mausi Kühl. Selva Negra, named for the Black Forest of Kühl’s German ancestors, is a 2,000-acre farm (much of it virgin cloud forest) where visitors eat at a central Swiss-style chalet and sip the sun-dried coffee. The coffee mucilage, along with cow and pig manure, undergoes anaerobic decomposition in an underground tank, producing enough methane to cook the food. Electricity for the coffee mill is produced by a Pelton water turbine. The farm’s laboratory experiments with various “teas” to prevent coffee rust. The staff raises tilapia for guests, but the fish waste also feeds worms that decompose pulp to make fertilizer. All of that ecological work has produced an astonishing biodiversity, with over 350 types of butterflies and 280 bird species.

  Such coffee ecotourism is a growing trend throughout Latin America, where the coffee-harvesting season coincides with cold northern winters. People can help pick ripe beans while getting to know the local people. When they return home, they inevitably bring back a greater appreciation of what a cup of coffee means in terms of labor and love, and sometimes that can evolve into direct trade of the beans to a local coffeehouse or roaster. Ecotourists can find coffee farms to visit in Latin America, Africa, and India.130

  The activist organization Global Exchange sponsors “Reality Tours” to some coffee regions. A few coffee roaster/retailers also organize trips to origin, including the Just Coffee Cooperative in Madison, Wisconsin, Higher Grounds Trading Company in Traverse City, Michigan, and Seattle-based Pura Vida Coffee.

  For those who can’t travel to remote coffee regions, Majka Burhardt, a rock climber, writer, and coffee maven, has written Coffee: Authentic Ethiopia (2010), a lavishly illustrated cultural guide to the birthplace of coffee. “I want to augment people’s appreciation of coffee by helping them understand the cultures that produce it,” says Burhardt. She plans a series of such books.

  Befriending the Birds

  Walking through Selva Negra, you might spot a Resplendent Quetzal, a toucan, or 279 other species of birds. I didn’t see a quetzal during my brief hike there, but I heard a constant chorus of birdsong and the occasional cry of a monkey. Like me, most rain forest visitors actually see little of the wildlife around them, but they can hear the thrumming chorus. These birds lie at the heart of a controversy over coffee cultivation techniques. Should coffee always be grown under overarching trees that provide shade?

  Shade-grown coffee provides an important habitat for migratory and resident birds. “Thousands of birds fill the air with song—pert green parakeets, big gray mockingbirds, brilliant bluebirds and little yellow canaries,” wrote a 1928 visitor to Guatemala. “It is difficult to imagine anything more delightful than a ride through the long avenues of trees heavy with green coffee berries. . . . When new ground is to be planted in coffee, shade is the most important consideration.” This description is still true of plantations such as Selva Negra, but their number is dwindling. Within the past few years, coffee grown under shade—“Bird Friendly,” as trademarked by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center—has provided one more value-added way to sell beans.

  Prompted by the invasion of leaf rust into Latin America—arriving in Brazil in 1970 and spreading to Central America six years later—researchers urged coffee growers to “technify” their plantations, switching from traditional arabica beans such as bourbon and typica varieties that had been grown beneath shade to “modern” arabica varieties such as caturra, catuai, or catimor, which can be grown in full sun, as long as the soil is fertilized and weeds and pests are hit with agrochemicals. In Central America, the U.S. Agency for International Development provided funds for the switch to technified sun coffee.

  As a result, by 1990, 69 percent of Colombian and 40 percent of Costa Rican coffee was grown in closely packed rows in full sun. When I visited a sun plantation in Costa Rica, the trees were so tightly packed that I could not easily walk between them. They stretched up the hillside in solid, silent, low-slung ranks. There were no birds, only morning glory vines climbing the squat trees in search of the sun.

  The sun coffee revolution has failed to fulfill its promise. Instead, it has contributed to ecological degradation and loss of important habitat. Various species of swallows, swifts, warblers, vireos, orioles, raptors, thrushes, and hummingbirds are neo-tropical migrants—Western Hemisphere birds that travel from their breeding grounds in the United States and Canada to their wintering grounds in the American tropics each year. Up to 10 billion birds occupy the temperate forests of North America from May to September, then fly south to winter in Latin America. During the decade 1978-1987, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services’ Breeding Bird Survey showed a decline in neo-tropical migrants, ranging from 1 percent to 3 percent annually. Although other factors may be involved, it is alarming that shade-grown coffee was declining at precisely the same time.

  “Throughout the Latin American wintering grounds of migratory birds,” wrote Russell Greenberg of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center in 1991, “the natural landscape is undergoing massive changes at phenomenal rates.” The world’s rain forest belt once covered 5 billion acres, 14 percent of the earth’s land surface. Humans have destroyed over half of it, and the destruction continues at the rate of eighty acres a minute, according to some estimates. Species are disappearing at the rate of three per hour. In the 1830s Charles Darwin observed, “The land is one great wild, untidy luxuriant hothouse, made by nature herself.” Much of the land he saw has now been deforested for cattle, soybeans, or other uses.

  Coffee is an Ethiopian tree/shrub that has displaced local vegetation and dramatically altered the habitat. Yet “traditional” shade-grown coffee at least provides a relatively benign habitat, encouraging more biodiversity than many other agricultural alternatives. “Traditional” is in quotation marks because much coffee of the eighteenth and nineteenth century was grown in full sun until farmers developed production systems that mimic coffee’s natural understory habitat. Arguments over the amount of shade needed, as well as the benefits of full sun, are long-standing.

  By the turn of the last century, most agronomists came down on the side of shade. In 1901 the U.S. Department of Agriculture published Shade in Coffee Culture, in which O. F. Cook pointed out the multiple benefits of nitrogen-fixing leguminous shade trees. “[They] hold the soil in place, and seldom require replanting or other care; their shade discourages the growth of weeds, diminishes the cost of cultivation, and lessens the bad effects of drought.” They also protect coffee from high winds and provide mulch in the form of falling leaves.

  Cook observed that two indigenous Latin American products, cacao and coca, were also grown under shade prior to the European invasion. These shaded production areas qualify as “agroforestry” systems, a combination of agriculture and forestlike production that has received significant attention from researchers in recent years for the ecological and socioeconomic benefits provided by these multi-use management schemes.

  By eliminating shade trees, modern technified coffee plantations can produce more beans but must support hastened photosynthesis through heavy applications of petroleum-based fertilizers. Perhaps due to the high elevation and marked dry seasons, leaf rust has not caused as many problems
as feared in shaded plantations. The coffee berry borer, one of the crop’s fiercest insect pests, has thrived in the monoculture of sun coffee, though other wildlife cannot survive there.

  In countries such as El Salvador, shaded coffee plantations account for 60 percent of the remaining “forest” cover. Billions of migratory birds fly south into the narrow funnel of southern Mexico and Central America, where loss of the coffee canopy could prove disastrous.

  Turf Battles over Politically Correct Coffee

  In September 1996, I attended the First Sustainable Coffee Congress sponsored by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. Academics, conservationists, and development experts came together for three days with coffee growers, importers, exporters, roasters, and retailers to discuss and debate coffee sustainability.

  Biological researchers at the conference made a compelling case for shade coffee’s support of biodiversity. “What is surprising here is the large numbers of species of insects that are found in the canopy of single trees in the traditional farm,” Professor Ivette Perfecto reported. Russell Greenberg noted that his Mexican survey found 180 bird species in shaded coffee, second only to the number found in undisturbed tropical forests.

  Greenberg then launched into a pitch for bird-friendly coffee’s commercial potential. Of the 54 million Americans who consider themselves birders, 24 million traveled in 1991 to observe their avian friends, spending $2.5 billion. The demographics for serious birders—well-educated, well-heeled, and interested in conservation—dovetailed nicely with those who drank specialty coffees.