Production in Asia

More than any other commodity, coffee was produced in poor colonies and countries for the enjoyment of those in rich countries. But, as we have seen, the Europeans who created coffee colonies (the Dutch, British, French, and Portuguese) were not the ones who consumed the most coffee on a per capita basis. Coffee was not only an export crop but a reexport crop.

In 1690, the Dutch introduced the coffee bush to Java, where their colonial might was soon employed to force peasants to labor on coffee plantations. Others were compelled to grow trees on village lands and give over shares or to sell at fixed low prices to government agents. Although clearly a coercive system, it relied on traditional local power relations and peasant agriculture to extract profit. Technology was primitive and yields low. But costs, for the Dutch, were even lower; so profits were high. The Javanese, however, experienced little capital accumulation or economic development (Kok 1864; Geertz 1971). A different kind of labor system was employed on the tiny island of Bourbon (renamed Reunion), lying southwest of Madagascar, where French colonists forced African slaves to grow coffee. In the eighteenth century, the island became one of the world’s largest coffee producers.

Throughout Asia, coffee growing was a colonial enterprise as it continues to be in Papua New Guinea (Stewart 1992). Dutch and British East Indian colonies were among the world’s leading producers until the last part of the nineteenth century when a fungus devastated coffee fields. And disease has plagued coffee growers the world over because “coffee is one of the tropical plants most susceptible to diseases and insect attacks which may destroy whole plantations” (International Institute of Agriculture 1947: 22).

Many East Indian plantations turned to tea or rubber, and where coffee maintained its hold, as in Sumatra, it was mostly the robusta, rather than the disease-plagued arabica, that was grown on peasant plots. Ceylon (Sri Lanka), India, and the Philippines were also major coffee producers into the nineteenth century, but were overwhelmed by Latin American production in the twentieth century.