On racist coffee and economic conditions
Political commitments not only *can* exist in the supply (value) chain. Better values must enter buying and selling relationships to keep coffee alive.
Standing outside a well-loved barn in the hills outside Chilón, the building full of flanneled farmers making it more like a church, Don Ramon tells me he feels sorry for me. He pulls an apple down from a tree, tosses it to me like a way less fucked up Dennis Quaid might in some baseball-themed coming of age story. “You have to come here to live this way,” he told me. “We’re all organic. We don’t have the same problems you do.”
He was right, in a way. It was 2021 and I was conducting my master’s research on farmer narratives, how “storytelling,” one of the bastardized words that’s been corporatized to mean almost nothing, relates to income. Who in coffee doesn’t say the same things, over and over: Life ‘at origin’ is so simple. They’ve got it all figured out. It’s really us that’s impoverished, if you think about it. Spiritually, I mean.
But the trappings of this noble savage stereotype can belie the real issues facing coffee farmers.
Judith Ganes’s Coffee Market Outlook argued in October that Vietnam exports narrowly missed disaster thanks to a deluge of rain. That tracks with Standart Magazine’s fall report on robusta growth: climate change is leading to a loss of productivity, increase in disease and pests, and erratic weather making “harvest-planning impossible.” And all the while farmers, who may indeed have a pastoral sensibility and less rat race-y pace, continue to bear the brunt of global north and west countries’ rampant mismanagement of CO₂. In the project “The Age of Extinction,” the Guardian reports even the oft-cited European countries including Finland are no longer on track to meet 2035 green goals — quite the opposite.
There are cracks in this harbinger of doom’s armor, though. Classical economists recline and roll their eyes when political economists contend actors in the market must consider social responsibility. But it’s not only a way to ensure a sustainable buying relationship; Operating with considerations to all agents in the transaction is the only way to keep those red cherries swelling on the tree into the future.
Take Capeltic in Chilón, the coffee arm of the Yomol A’tel cooperative where Ramon is a member. The organization keeps strong ties to multigenerational coffee farmers, comprising a web of producers throughout Chiapas. They opened their first cafe in 2010 inside the Iberoamericana University in Mexico City to better capture value for producers. This is the community covered in the film A Six Dollar Cup of Coffee. I could go on about this group for ages.
Approaching their production and distribution through what’s called a solidarity economic paradigm, the cooperative ensures better wages and working conditions for workers. Since members are distributed throughout all the stages of the supply chain — picking to roasting to bagging to making lattes — wages and returns are higher; children of producers can come into the city from the hinterlands to learn finance, how to make other goods such as soap and honey. Investment is high. COVID hit the cafe arm hard, as it did everywhere, but the approach is sound. Without these kinds of interventions we see a surge of migrants from historic coffee communities, documented well by Joseph Nevins in "Dying for a Cup of Coffee? Migrant Deaths in the US-Mexico Border Region in a Neoliberal Age” for instance.
This is a string of Indigenous-owned and operated businesses producing high-quality coffee demonstrating relatively strong methods that serves as a primo example for anyone wondering how to implement better practices in their buying and selling models.
Milton Friedman would tell you an approach looking at anything other than profit is nonsense. He was the founder of the Chicago Boys, the architect of much of the United States’s neoliberalism in the 1980s, the dark counsel to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Whether its Friedman’s contemporary E.F. Schumacher or 21st century acolyte Melissa Dell, there is a way to incorporate colonial history and reparations into buying relationships. So remember: any business owner or trader who says “What am I supposed to do? My hands are tied” is, consciously or unconsciously, subscribing to the Friedman approach. (Likely with fewer insurgent tactics, but still.)
Numerous approaches are suggested as solutions to coffee’s purchasing issues. Direct and fair trade, corporate donation programs and self-monitoring. I am always a big believer in government intervention when corruption and short-sightedness are off the table. Then there’s the synthetic coffee folks out there, and I’ve written on that trend; In short, I’m not convinced creating a new market, along with its own waste and unethical purchasing patterns, is a proper solution to what we in the consuming countries either created or inherited.
Evan Gilman, buyer at Royal Coffee in Oakland, speaks of the need for transparency across the purchasing board. I fuck with Gilman and I fuck with this simple pivot. Not a simple pivot to execute, I concede, but if buyers, traders, and farmers actually knew the exact breakdowns for coffee, we could at least have a smarter conversation. If I have any hopes for the sustainable intensification (SI) approach, and its hailing of artificial intelligence in farming, it is at this intersection.
These ideas may seem obvious to you. If so, it’s likely because specialty coffee, and the “coffee industry” (which usually refers to coffee professionals who work on the consuming side of the commodity) is actually fairly small, profits or growth aside. The people who work at the big dogs, the corporate execs and even traders or marketing folks at Dunkin’ and or whoever buys for IHOP, are on a whole other Internet. They’re not reading Franz Fanon; They’re reading Ayn Rand.
I got onto that other World Wide Web for a moment and encountered this weirdo promoting one of the myriad TikTok get rich quick schemes. He posts Elon Musk in a Tesla jacket, hairline still somewhat intact, saying how rewarding it is to become wealthy without a boss. If you didn’t know Musk is a nepo baby who *did not found Tesla,* consider this free education. Even the New York Post article I just linked praises the father-son duo as “a family of innovators and adventurers.” Never for a second think coffee doesn’t have loads of these jabronies deep in its veins.
My point is that better buying should not just be a platitude. It’s an option for consumers all the time, many of whom do not have the knowledge to do better and should be invited into the church of conservation. It’s an option for those in the industry all the time, too; Wrecking Ball Coffee made me a fan for life in 2017 when ownership turned down $40,000 from Salesforce in protest of the software’s contracts with U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Most coffee bosses are on that pro-capitalism, get rich quick shit. Those reductive platitudes can be seen strewn across all the largest multinational offenders, spanning each of Rothgeb’s coffee waves. Augustine Sedgewick in his book Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug. details Hills Bros. Coffee, a kind of spiritual antithesis to fellow San Francisco outfit Wrecking Ball.
Amongst other offenses, the business put out films portraying the easy going, donkey-filled life of El Salvadoran farmers; This movie came out as the local plutarchs literally derailed an entire way of life and laid the groundwork for much of the modern violence the country has survived. Lest we forget this is the company that so loved a generic image of a turbaned man they plastered his likeness all over their coffee. The business even commissioned a statue of him to be made which still stands on the waterfront; The man has no name other than “taster.”
So: read Nevin, not Friedman, and be like Wrecking Ball. Fewer pictures of coffee trees proving how much you love “farmers” and more buying from organizations practicing real communalism and collectivism. Moving the needle, however lightly, moves us away from sitting on our laurels while sighing in jealousy of the Don Ramons of the world. That’s racist, lazy, and only keeps all kinds of storms whipping through producing countries.
