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

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phase of the global rust epidemic, which lasted from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, was decisively shaped by the Cold War. Before the 1950s, coffee farmers in Latin America saw rust as a remote problem. But as the epidemic spread through West Africa, a handful of people, like the American Frederick Wellman, began to sound the alarm. In 1970, the rust was detected on a farm in Bahia, Brazil. Over the next fifteen years, farmers—along with a slew of national and transnational organizations—attempted to contain the rust as it spread inexorably across the Americas. The rust broke out in Nicaragua in 1976, and by the early 1980s, it had reached almost every corner of Latin America’s coffeelands.

      This epidemic and the responses to it were shaped by Cold War politics. This included international trade agreements, especially the International Coffee Agreement, which were, in part, designed to forestall rural unrest. The United States—particularly through the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the USAID—assumed a significant role in shaping coffee cultivation generally, and responses to the rust specifically. It helped finance the Coffee Rust Research Centre in Portugal and the Center for Tropical Agricultural Research (CATIE) in Costa Rica. During these decades, the national coffee industries across Latin America were arguably as strong as they had ever been. National coffee institutes conducted research and offered coffee farmers financial and technical support. Organizations like Brazil’s Instituto Brasileiro do Café, Colombia’s CENICAFÉ, and Costa Rica’s ICAFÉ conducted innovative research on breeding, chemical control, and other facets of the disease. In many places, the rust epidemic triggered a Green Revolution–style modernization of coffee farming. Scientists and government bureaucrats encouraged farmers to switch to higher-yielding dwarf coffees. The higher productivity—along with heavy application of fertilizers and fungicides—more than offset any losses caused by the rust. Farmers were also encouraged to reduce or eliminate shade on the assumption that full sunlight was inimical to the rust. Still, many farmers across the Americas only partially technified their farms, for example choosing to use chemical control but continuing to plant traditional arabicas.

      In Latin America, the rust caused panic before it arrived. But when it did arrive, it did not produce a wholesale collapse of coffee production as it had elsewhere. Some individual farmers suffered, at times catastrophically. But collectively, the coffeelands of Latin America did not see significant declines in production. The coordinated scientific and institutional responses played a part in controlling the fungus. But there was also a strong element of geographical luck: most of Latin America’s coffeelands were in comparatively cool, high-altitude landscapes with distinct dry seasons, where the rust either was not a significant problem or could easily be managed. By the end of the 1980s, the rust had been domesticated virtually everywhere in the Americas. Farmers had adapted to it and treated it as just another disease. As long as farmers in susceptible areas kept spraying and fertilizing their farms, it seemed that the rust no longer presented a significant threat.

      A third phase—the neoliberal phase—of the coffee rust began around 2008. A new series of devastating rust outbreaks, known as the Big Rust, began in Colombia, spread to Central America in 2012, and ultimately encompassed a vast area bounded by Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Peru. Unlike the previous rust epidemics, the Big Rust was not triggered by the migration of a pathogen to an area that had previously been free of the disease. Rather, it was fueled in part by a complex set of changing weather patterns that favored the fungus. It was also caused by fundamental changes in the economic and institutional context of global coffee production, which once again made the coffeelands vulnerable to outbreaks. The collapse of the International Coffee Agreement’s price stabilization system in 1989 triggered a new, highly volatile cycle of booms and busts. During the busts, farmers economized by cutting back or delaying measures that had previously kept the rust in check. Farmers were, in many cases, more poorly equipped to respond than they had been a generation before. In the 1980s and 1990s, many of the public institutions that had previously provided essential research, credit, and extension to coffee farmers fell victim to austerity programs.

      The Big Rust has been far more devastating than the initial outbreak of the 1970s and 1980s, and recovery has been much slower. In many respects, Colombia’s coffee industry responded quickly and effectively; its national research institute, CENICAFÉ, rolled out new resistant varieties and advised farmers on other disease-control measures. The National Federation of Coffee Growers effectively lobbied the government for financial support for afflicted farmers. But even in this best-case scenario, it took five years for Colombian coffee production to recover to pre-rust levels. Elsewhere in Latin America, few states could emulate the Colombian model. In places like Mexico, the epidemic encouraged farmers to mobilize and demand more resources from the state. Out of necessity, the private sector—especially the specialty coffee industry—started to offer technical and financial support to some farmers. They are now financing new research organizations, such as World Coffee Research. Or, like Starbucks, they are conducting their own research. While these private-sector initiatives are important, their reach remains limited; they can help only a small portion of afflicted farmers. New technologies, such as systemic fungicides and F1 coffees, also help in the fight against rust. But fundamentally, the main obstacles to managing the rust remain organizational and financial as much as technical.

      The Big Rust is a bellwether event, foreshadowing the kinds of adaptations that coffee farmers will need to make in the face of climate change. While it remains unclear whether or not the Big Rust was caused by long-term climate change, unusual weather patterns certainly played a critical role. As researchers and farmers adapt to the rust and to the other environmental challenges facing coffee production, their paradigms are gradually shifting. Before the 1990s, most rust-control efforts focused on increasing productivity. The assumption was that increased production would offset the costs incurred by disease control. Now, even in conventional coffee production, control programs focus more on ecological and economic sustainability. Both the ecological and economic challenges must be addressed if coffee is to have a long-term future.

      CHAPTER 2

       Coffee Rust Contained

      HISTORIES OF epidemic disease often begin with a dramatic story of the first outbreak and the chaos it produced. While this approach makes for a compelling beginning, it also privileges the pathogen’s role in the disease. It diminishes, and sometimes erases, the critical role played by the other two elements of the disease triangle. Shifting focus to these other elements—in this case, the coffee plant and the ecosystems—reminds us that epidemics do not appear out of nowhere. Rather, epidemics are fundamentally historical; they are the product of long-term processes that produce vulnerable ecosystems. Here, we will follow arabica coffee’s journey around the world, in a series of transfers that took it from a small corner of southwestern Ethiopia across the global tropics, while leaving the rust fungus behind. We will track how political and economic forces—especially but not only European colonialism—shaped coffee’s growing popularity as a crop and as a drink. As coffee became more popular, farmers continued to expand coffee frontiers, which consisted almost exclusively of rust-susceptible arabica cultivars. They also intensified coffee production. By the mid-nineteenth century, the world’s coffeelands produced more coffee than ever, but they were also more vulnerable to diseases and pests. Productivity and vulnerability were, at that moment, two sides of the same coin.

      The coffee that most of us drink is known botanically as Coffea arabica. The plant belongs to the genus Coffea, which includes more than one hundred species. Species of Coffea grow in a wide range of ecosystems across equatorial Africa, from dry lowlands to wet highlands, and from Liberia in the west to Madagascar in the east (see map 2.1). Arabica coffee, however, is native to one small corner of this range: the montane forests of southwestern Ethiopia, west of the Great Rift valley, between 1,300 and 2,000 meters above sea level in the regions of Kaffa and Illubabor. It enjoys the temperate highland climates, growing best in the shaded, diverse under-story of the forest canopy with temperatures between 15°C and 28°C and moderate amounts of rain.1 It is a small woody tree, like a shrub, that usually has one main stem with lateral branches growing almost horizontally. The branches are densely covered with dark green leaves, which the plant retains year-round. It produces fruit: the coffee “cherries.”

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