In other coffee-producing lands, large-scale plantations like those of Brazil were unusual even during the height of the export boom. In Venezuela, for example, despite a tradition of slave labor and haciendas, smaller-scale production eventually prevailed (Roseberry 1983). In Colombia, the eastern part of the country had a strong colonial tradition of peasants, with no slaves or latifundia, whereas in the west there had been both. The east was the leading growing area until the beginning of the twentieth century when western provinces, such as Cundinamarca and Antio-quia, rapidly increased production. But in Cundina-marca, coffee was grown on shares; only in. Antioquia were haciendas important social units, and there were also many small growers as well. Nationally, by 1932, 87 percent of all coffee farms had less than 5,000 trees (farmers usually placed 500 to 800 trees per acre), and 74 percent of all production came from farms of less than 20,000 trees, meaning less than 40 acres (Beyer 1947; Nieto Arteta 1971; Palacios 1980).
In Central America, coffee was also grown mostly on small and middle-size farms called fincas. Although Costa Rica was far from being a rural democracy (71 percent of the peasantry was landless in 1883) and land ownership was concentrated, even the biggest coffee plantations were often discontinuous and fragmented into a number of small or medium-size lots, sometimes several kilometers apart (Cardoso 1977: 175-6; Seligson 1980). In fact, even the “great estates” in Costa Rica were defined as anything over 76 acres, which in Brazil would scarcely have been considered a middle-sized holding.
Elsewhere in Central America, coffee estates were somewhat larger than in Costa Rica. Nicaragua did have some coffee haciendas, but they were neither numerous nor extensive. El Salvador, the most dependent of all countries on coffee, had a dynamic agrarian bourgeoisie with extremely efficient production techniques and concentrated land holdings. But production was intensive, not extensive as in Brazil. Eugenio Aguilar was considered a large, wealthy planter with two fincas that held 230,000 trees on less than 300 acres. But in Guatemala and southern Mexico, with larger frontier areas, there were substantially larger holdings. Many were spread over 5,000 acres in Guatemala, and in Tehuantepec, Mexico, there were several coffee estates with 1.5 million trees on some 20,000 acres (Lindo-Fuentes 1990).
Coffee estates, in general, were smaller in Colombia and Central America than in Brazil because of terrain and transportation problems, along with a shortage of capital and labor, the relative absence of a frontier, and the presence of people with preexisting land claims. To compensate for the higher production costs wrought by such problems, growers had to produce a better coffee that would command a higher price at market.
Higher-quality coffee required more labor-intensive harvesting. Shade trees had to be planted, and the berries were picked individually just as they ripened, in contrast to the procedure of stripping entire branches as was done in Brazil. Workers would sometimes have to pass the same tree six or seven times during the harvest instead of just once. Better quality also demanded the more sophisticated and expensive “wet” method of treating the berry.
While inspecting this method in Costa Rica, the Brazilian planter Jorge Dumont Villares marveled that the preparation of coffee was a “true science” there. The berries were picked, hulled, then left 24 to 40 hours to ferment. Next, they were washed to remove the outer membrane and dried for one or two days. From the drying grounds, the beans were taken to dryers where they were left for 25 to 35 hours to dry. The parchment film was then removed mechanically and the beans sorted by size, quality, and color. Finally, the beans were polished (Villares 1927). Producing high-quality coffee, then, demanded substantial capital and technical expertise, as well as abundant labor. The capital was provided more by mill owners than by growers.
The relationship between coffee and the kind of labor applied to it varied from country to country and changed over time. As noted, coffee reinforced slavery in the Caribbean and in Brazil, but slavery was not common elsewhere in Latin America where other coercive forms of labor were applied. Nonetheless, as we have tried to show, coffee, plantations, and slavery or forced labor were not necessarily linked, and coffee did not always yield a strong landlord class. Rather, in Costa Rica, for example, merchants and millers came to predominate because of the smallholding pattern, and elsewhere merchants also became the dominant class. In Colombia, most of the progressive planters were initially merchants, and only in such areas as Cundinamarca were traditional landlords the coffee growers. Many Nicaraguan fin-queros were urban based, and the El Salvador coffee-grower class was largely composed of merchants and other urban-based capitalists who invested in land in the 1880s and 1890s as coffee prices rose. German merchants in Guatemala and Chiapas followed the same path.
In few cases was there much continuity between the colonial landed elite and the coffee bourgeoisie. In fact, many members of the coffee elite were nineteenth-century immigrants. Thus, it is a mistake to refer to the coffee growers of Central America and Colombia as Junkers or to discuss “landlord capitalism” as is often done (Winson 1989). Coffee was developed by a new bourgeois group that was not reluctant to invest in other sectors of the economy as well.
This does not mean that there was no resistance to the rule of coffee. In Guatemala, villagers frequently destroyed coffee fincas (Cambranes 1985). Peasants in western El Salvador, the center of coffee cultivation, in collaboration with the Communist party, attempted to overthrow the government in 1932. The result was at least 17,000 peasants dead in the gruesome massacre known simply as La Matanza (Anderson 1971;North 1985).
The willingness of coffee growers to use violence has often allowed the essence of their rule to continue while changing its appearance. Colombia never had a truly populist ruler; the traditional Liberals and Conservatives still share power. El Salvador and Guatemala have the most ferocious and brutal regimes of Central America, still overseen by descendants of the coffee elite. Sao Paulo was the last state to hold out against the populist leader Getulio Vargas, even waging civil war against him in 1932.
Yet there has been change. Sao Paulo, for example, although its economy is now based on the cities and factories that coffee gave birth to rather than on the countryside, has become the home of Latin. America’s largest socialist party, the Partido dos Trabalhadores. In Costa Rica, a revolution in 1949 brought to power a semiautonomous state that has presided over Latin America’s most vigorous democracy; and in Nicaragua, division among growers and a single family’s attempt to monopolize wealth led to the creation of the first truly socialist regime on the American mainland. In all of these cases, however, democratic trends began to grow only after coffee ceased to be the dominant export.
Socioeconomic Aspects and a Return to Africa
During the years 1850 to 1930, the world coffee market was fairly homogeneous, with the vast majority of the world’s coffee (as much as 95 percent) produced in Latin America. Although there are an estimated 50 different species of the genus Coffea, and a much greater number of small species or elementary hybrid-producing forms, over 90 percent of exports before World War II were of the same species, the arabica.
Such apparent uniformity, however, is a bit misleading. Because all coffee is cultivated outside of its natural habitat, under different methods and a wide range of natural conditions, the arabica is different on virtually each plantation (International Institute of Agriculture 1947: 19-20). Beans also differ from year to year. There are 10 generally recognized subspecies.
The international market divided coffee by port of exit and grade of the bean (determined by color, size, and degree of breakage). The main division in the world economy, however, was between “Brazils” and “milds”; the latter, produced in Colombia and Central America, began making inroads into the dominance of the former beginning in the 1920s, when Brazil’s coffee valorization program propped up the price of the stronger and more bitter “Brazils.” Different national crops also varied substantially according to the harvest season. But the time it took for beans to reach market was not of great consequence because they did not deteriorate over time (as, for example, apples, did) and importers maintained large stocks in the consuming countries to smooth the flow to market.
Despite such differences, the producing countries shared many similarities. They exported almost all of their crop to Europe and North America. And all used fairly similar cultivation techniques demanded by the arabica bush or “tree.” In order to increase yield and facilitate the harvest (done almost always by hand), the trees were topped in their third year and only allowed to grow to 6 to 16 feet, though in the wild they grow to 35 feet; hence they were often termed bushes rather than trees. The arabica grows best with deep, permeable, well-aerated soil and a minimum rainfall of 50 to 60 inches during germination (coffee lands in Latin America were almost never irrigated as they were in Yemen and Java). It also needs a long, dry season and mild climate, with the optimum temperature between 59 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit.
Coffee-producing countries have also shared a secondary position in the industrialization of coffee. Since the consumers were in the rich countries, the retailing, wholesaling, roasting, grinding, and packaging were done in those countries. Growers were, thus, excluded from the most technologically sophisticated aspects of the production of coffee, from which the greatest innovations such as packaging, vacuum sealing, and soluble coffee emerged. These, along with roasting and advertising, have also constituted the most lucrative of the forward linkages. Thus the Santos price was at most half the New York retail price, and if the coffee were sold by the cup rather than the can, the additional labor cost and markup meant that as much as 90 percent of the value added was created in the consuming countries.2
Today the supermarket price of standard roasted or ground coffee is 3 to 4 times the New York green price. Restaurants sell coffee by the cup for 6 to 10 times the retail bean price. And the specialty brands are even more expensive. Thus, upwards of three-quarters of the value is added in the consuming countries. The only dent in the consuming countries’ market command has been made by the increasing ability of some of the major exporting countries to produce and export soluble coffee.
For most of the coffee-producing Latin. American countries, the cultivation of coffee became important toward the end of the nineteenth century or early in the twentieth century, and coffee came to dominate national exports, creating monocultures. In 1929, coffee cultivation was responsible for 71 percent of exports in Brazil, 61 percent in Colombia, 77 percent in Guatemala, 77 percent in Haiti, 54 percent in Nicaragua, 67 percent in Costa Rica, and fully 93 percent in El Salvador (Ukers 1935).
Since World War II, however, coffee cultivation has slowly shifted back to Africa. Although Latin America still produces most of the world’s coffee, the crop is no longer responsible for more than half of the exports of any one of its countries. In Africa, however, in the late 1960s, coffee represented more than half the exports of. Angola, Burundi, Ethiopia, and Rwanda, and almost half of Uganda’s (Barbiroli 1970), and the continent now supplies about 18 percent of total world exports. Africans usually plant the more disease-resistant and faster-maturing robusta bush. It produces a less desirable brew but has been particularly successful in the soluble coffee market.
Coffee has come full circle in. Africa. Ethiopians had vast forests of wild arabica trees but did not enter the trade until this century. Indeed, a nineteenth-century Dutch observer wrote that “the plant is not only no object of culture there, but is abandoned to persecution in some parts through the rage of blind fanaticism” (Kok 1864:210).
European colonial regimes and planters initiated the coffee export economy in Ethiopia, as well as in Kenya, Angola, Uganda, and elsewhere. Africans were sometimes pointedly excluded by law from growing the arabica or robusta, although in Zaire and Ethiopia they were forced to grow or harvest the beans. In the last 40 years, however, decolonization has transformed the situation. Today, the Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, and Uganda are the principal coffee-growing nations of Africa, and African peasants, not European plantation managers, are the overwhelming producers (Clarence-Smith 1994).
World History
