Coffee Is Not Forever - Stuart McCook Series in Ecology and History

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cultivation spread across the global tropics in tandem with the coffee boom in Europe. Initially, Europe’s coffee boom was fueled by coffee from Yemen. European trading companies—the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company (VOC)—started to export coffee from Yemen to London and Amsterdam, and then to consumers across Europe. As European demand grew, Yemen gradually lost its monopoly on coffee cultivation. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, people disseminated coffee plants throughout the Indian Ocean basin. European trading companies, especially the Dutch VOC, played some role in this dissemination. But the plant also circulated through parallel non-European (largely Muslim) trade and pilgrimage networks in the Indian Ocean basin. By the late seventeenth century, arabica coffee was cultivated in western India, where most of the coffee was consumed locally. The Dutch introduced coffee to Java from India rather than from Yemen. By the late seventeenth century, arabica coffee was widely, if not yet densely, cultivated along an arc reaching from Yemen in the east to Java in the west.32

      Arabica coffee was introduced to the New World in the early eighteenth century. In 1696, the Dutch transported a single coffee tree from Java to Amsterdam, where it was cultivated in the city’s botanical garden. From Amsterdam, some of the plant’s offspring were sent to Paris and cultivated in the Jardin du Roi. Based on this plant, the French naturalist Antoine de Jussieu published one of the earliest botanical descriptions of coffee, which he classified as Jasminum Arabicum.33 Between about 1710 and 1720, both the Dutch and the French took progeny of this plant to the New World. According to popular French legend, it was taken to Martinique by one Chevalier de Clieu, who sustained the fragile plant by giving it some of his water rations. Even if this story is true, de Clieu was not alone; around the same time, and with much less fanfare, the Dutch took arabica coffee to Suriname. By the mid-eighteenth century, the arabica coffee plant—based on the progeny of these early introductions—had been disseminated across the Americas, from Mexico to Brazil.34 The founding populations of arabica coffee in the New World were built on a limited genetic base.

      It is safe to assume that H. vastatrix was not present in the Americas before the twentieth century. In the unlikely event that the rust had been present in Java, it would have faced a series of significant bottlenecks on its journey to the Americas. It is virtually impossible that the delicate fungus could have survived the extreme temperatures of the voyage around Cape Horn from Java to Amsterdam. Before the nineteenth century, live plants were usually transported in pots on the ship decks; more delicate plants may have been placed in wood or glass cases to protect them from the elements, but even those were left open so that air could circulate. Had the fungus somehow survived, watchful gardeners at the botanical gardens in Paris or Amsterdam would certainly have seen it; there is no evidence they did. The fungus (and the plant) would have again been exposed to extreme conditions during the Atlantic crossing.

      Coffee-farming practices would, at first, have kept rust levels so low that the rust would not have significantly affected production. In the Dutch East Indies, Javanese farmers usually cultivated coffee in densely planted hedgerows (kopi pagar) close to their households. Farmers in India cultivated coffee both as a garden crop and as a forest crop. In Mysore, coffee was cultivated in fenced gardens called hittlus, and coffee was intercropped with “lime, plantain, ginger, and mango.” Kandyan farmers on Ceylon also cultivated coffee as a garden crop, mixed with other cash and subsistence crops. This strategy allowed them to minimize economic and ecological risks. Coffee required little care or attention beyond some basic weeding, and it provided a good source of income. Few native planters produced coffee exclusively, nor did they depend on it as their major source of cash income. It was simply part of a diversified ecological and economic repertoire.35

      Power and Vulnerability in the Nineteenth Century

      By the mid-nineteenth century, the world’s coffeelands had become critically vulnerable to commodity diseases like coffee rust. A series of political, economic, and technological revolutions had sharply increased production and consumption of coffee around the globe. Many of these changes had their roots in the Industrial Revolution. Among other things, the Industrial Revolution helped spur mass consumption in the metropolises and factory towns of Europe and North America. Europe’s industrial powers competed aggressively to control trade and territories in Asia and Africa and to consolidate control of tropical territories they already held. Colonial states often obliged their subjects to produce tropical commodities, both to meet metropolitan demand and to provide revenue for the colonial states. Settlers also flocked to the tropical colonies, many of them encouraged by the hope that plantations would offer them a quick path to prosperity. In some cases, colonized peoples took advantage of the new colonial networks and started producing tropical commodities on their own. In Latin America, the leaders of the newly independent nations pursued economic development by exporting commodities to the industrializing Global North. In industrializing Europe and the United States, coffee gradually became a cheap stimulant, accessible to rich and poor alike. Coffee consumption in the United States exploded during these years, fueled by growing production from Brazil. By the century’s end, Americans drank more coffee than all European countries combined. New railroad and steamship networks reduced transportation costs, helping drive prices downward. The production of tropical commodities expanded as farmers across the global tropics produced ever more sugar, tea, cocoa, rubber, bananas, and—of course—coffee.36

      In these years, global demand for coffee typically increased faster than supply, which encouraged farmers to continually expand production. Initially, producers in Asia—especially in the Dutch East Indies, Ceylon, and India—dominated global production, accounting for about a third of global coffee production until the 1880s.37 But over the nineteenth century the Americas, especially Brazil, decisively surpassed Asia. Coffee cultivation in Brazil quickly expanded into the forest regions around Rio de Janeiro and then vast forest regions beyond. By midcentury, Brazil produced half of the world’s coffee; by the end of the century, it produced more than 80 percent.38

      The boom was initially led by small and medium producers. In the early decades of Ceylon’s coffee boom, for example, most of the island’s coffee was produced by Kandyan smallholders. Most of this coffee was grown under shade, as part of a complex production system. Similarly, smallholders in Java “preferred to clear only undergrowth and small trees, planting coffee at stake under tall jungle trees. The coffee trees took longer to bear, and yields were lower, but they lived longer, and soil damage was checked.”39 These cultivation systems embodied a different view of agriculture, economy, and environment. Farmers were not simply seeking to maximize productivity and profit. Profit was certainly one goal, but they also took a longer view about what we would now call ecological and economic sustainability. Perhaps it also reflected the fact that they did not have the same access to “virgin” forests as better-funded farmers.

      More specialized estate coffee cultivation began in the eighteenth century. Europeans, especially the French, first cultivated coffee as a plantation monoculture in the Indian Ocean’s Île Bourbon (now Réunion) and in the West Indies: Martinique, Guadeloupe, and—above all—St. Domingue.40 By the second half of the eighteenth century, coffee production in the West Indies had far surpassed production in the Indian Ocean. Arabica coffee had been introduced to St. Domingue in the 1720s; just fifty years later, in 1775, the island exported almost 22,500 metric tons of coffee. By 1789, it was the world’s single largest coffee producer, exporting about 40,000 metric tons.41 These levels of productivity depended, however, on slave labor. St. Domingue’s coffee exports collapsed in the wake of the slave uprising that began in 1789, which also toppled the colonial government. Between roughly 1790 and 1830, estate coffee production across the West Indies collapsed as a result of political strife, abolition movements, and competition with the booming sugar industry for scarce labor. Cuba was the only place in the West Indies where estate production survived, although even there coffee producers had to compete with more-prosperous sugar producers for increasingly scarce slave labor.

      While estate coffee declined in the West Indies, it boomed in Asia and mainland Latin America. In those places, coffee monocultures became much more common as planters, often using coerced labor, sought to maximize the productivity and profitability of their farms. Planters cleared “virgin” forests in Brazil,

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