Brewing Sustainability in the Coffee and Tea Industries

From Producer to Consumer

Alissa Bilfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000615388
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Agribusiness
• Index: Business

This book focuses on the often intertwined industries of coffee and tea, using accounts of single producer communities to highlight the transformation from plantation-style colonial agriculture towards systems that now claim to produce social and environmental benefits from the farm to the cup.

Focusing on the dynamics of farmers' experiences producing coffee and tea ethically and sustainably at origin, the book shows how these values are transmitted and reinforced throughout the value chain. Exploring tandem case studies of fair trade cooperatives in Guatemala and Sri Lanka, it provides an insight into the creation of more sustainable value chains from producer to consumer in the global marketplace, incorporating the perspectives of coffee exporters, importers, roasters, and café owners. This book is focused on the prospects of the specialty movement in food as a catalyst for forging more authentic, just, and sustainable supply chains that consider both people and the environment.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of food and agriculture, sustainable food systems and supply chains, the fair trade movement, sustainable development, and social entrepreneurship and social innovation.

Part I The History

1 Transforming the Daily Cup

DOI: 10.4324/9781003228851-3

Introduction

The botanical origins of coffee and tea are separated by thousands of miles. Yet, because of history and colonization, these two beverages have become intertwined. First, we must understand the relationship between coffee, tea, and systems that comprise these two industries. This next chapter compares and contrasts the origins and connected rise of coffee and tea from their precolonial domestication to their current global reach. A great deal has been written about this subject by historians and botanists, both equally intrigued by these two transcendent beverages. Although not the central focus of this book, a briefing on these origins provides the requisite context for understanding current and future trends in sustainability in regards to these industries. Perhaps most importantly, it also provides critical background for understanding the current perspectives and experiences of farmers, traders, and consumers.

At the material level, the most obvious similarities of tea and coffee are that they are both beverages of plant origin that are steeped in water. The inspiring and addictive effects of these beverages on the human body cannot be underestimated as motivation for their sustained spread throughout the world. Both of these beverages feature the stimulating compound caffeine, alongside several other key metabolites. This is where the plants diverge in effect. Some claim that coffee produces more of a jolt with a crash, while tea produces more of an energizing and steady effect that plateaus. Either way, both contain caffeine, an addictive drug that creates a sense of elevated wakefulness within its user. A dearth of scientific research has been conducted over the last century on this topic. Those who are interested in the most recent compendium can consult Teas, Cocoa and Coffee: Plant Secondary Metabolites and Health by Drs. Crosier, Ashihara, and Toma's-Barberan.¹ In their eloquent scientific tome, they provide an extensive and detailed summation of the mythological origins of each beloved plant stimulant. Perhaps most importantly, they describe the compelling physical impact of caffeine and associated plant alkaloids on human health with attention to bioavailability, absorption, and metabolism.

Caffeine may be a major part of why coffee and tea have become so popular, but how did these beverages become so widely available? This is a curiosity that food historians have been contemplating for decades, with a new volume being written about the subject and released regularly. While writing and research stretches back centuries, a few recent scholars have summarized their predecessors' work for our benefit. Current writing on the topic blends history, anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, and business to elucidate how coffee and tea have transformed the world.^2,3,4,5,6 The precolonial histories of these beverages, which are known in the zeitgeist through a variety of popular mythologies, give some insight into what drove the globalization of coffee and tea.

Origins and Domestication

Tea

Unlike coffee, tea has a longer domesticated history by a few thousand years. The origins of tea are steeped in Buddhist mythology. One of the most well-known legends dates to the Tang dynasty in China. Bodhidharma, the founder of Chan Buddhism, accidentally fell asleep after meditating in front of a wall for nine years. When he awoke, he cut off his eyelids in frustration at his weakness. The eyelids, tealeaf shaped, fell to the ground and took root, growing into tea bushes. Various other myths and stories recount tea's entrance into human society.⁷ However, tea historians now believe that the original wild tea trees that predate domestication likely spanned a larger geographic region. This region spanned from India to the modern-day Chinese border in Yunnan through to Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam.⁸ That said, domestication of the plant, though still disputed, was likely in China according to the botanical record.⁹ The original tea economy in these areas was based on the labor and care of small family farms, unlike the large-scale tea plantation model that churns out the volume of tea we enjoy today. Historically, tea in China and its other countries of origin had been predominantly managed by families. More labor-intensive aspects of production were then coordinated at the village level.¹⁰

Tea, as many would assume, comes from a leaf identified by modern science as Camellia sinensis, with leaves that grow on a bush or tree. What fewer people realize is how that leaf comes to resemble the dark colored, sometimes powdered substance that is often found inside of a teabag. Tea grows best in warm humid climates, from sea level to the higher altitude hill country. The terroir of the land heavily influences the quality of the tea. Depending on the region, the most precious tea leaves are harvested at the first flush, which is the first picking of the top-most subtle, precious leaves. Second flush and so on continue down the line in terms of flavor and desirability. Usually, there are at least three harvests throughout the year although in some cases, as is the reality in countries such as Sri Lanka and Kenya, tea is harvested year-round.¹¹ While manicured and terraced tea gardens are a mesmerizing sight to behold, the origins of this now highly domesticated crop are from the wild and gnarled tea trees of South-Central Asia.

Coffee

Coffee, as fewer are aware, comes from cherries that are picked from a tree-like bush. The coffee cherries become ripe once or twice a year, are harvested, sometimes fermented, usually pulped, and then the remaining beans are dried and processed. Each bean comes from a single cherry, and the vast majority of coffee cherries are still picked by hand. Worldwide, 80% of these cherries are produced by small-holder farmers, supporting an estimated 25 million families in the developing world.¹²

The botanical history of coffee has been traced to the highland of Ethiopia, Southeastern Sudan, and Northern Kenya, at some point making its way to Yemen.¹³ One of the main mythologized origin stories of coffee is from 850 AD in Abyssinia. This myth centers around a goatherd named Kaldi who noticed that some of his goats had returned to the herd with great vigor, and came to find that they had been imbibing red coffee berries.¹⁴ The goatherd took note, and this is how humans discovered the invigorating powers of the coffee plant. Extending beyond the goat myth, legend has it that a monastic heard of the effects that the beans had on goats. Desperately trying to keep his fellow monks awake during religious ceremonies, he introduced coffee to the monastery gardens. Thus, the trees became common fixtures of monastery gardens across the Arab world, harkening its spread.¹⁵ In Northern Africa, during the height of the Ottoman Empire, it was coffee that fueled the creativity, genius, and culture of the time. During this epoch, the popularity of coffee spread throughout the region where it became established as a key beverage from Cairo to Damascus and then to Istanbul. This resulted in the introduction of the coffee house as a meeting place where news, ideas, and politics were exchanged.¹⁶

Colonial Domestication

Through no coincidence, while tea was being planted by colonizers in the 1800s, coffee was being planted in tandem. While both coffee and tea were regionally prized beverages long before the colonial period, as European powers began circling the globe, they soon became two of the central commodities that fueled colonial empires. Coffee was first brought over to Europe from the Ottoman Empire. Here, colonizers stumbled upon a vast culture of coffee drinking that originated somewhere between modern-day Yemen and Ethiopia. As European colonizers came into contact with coffee across Africa and the Middle East, it soon became a prized beverage outside the Ottoman Empire.

One of the first colonial powers to usurp coffee as a crop was the Dutch. They brought coffee seeds from the Mocha region in Yemen to Indonesia, where the Dutch East India Company first started growing coffee as a colonial crop in Java during the 1690s.¹⁷ From this point onward, coffee began to spread to other colonial outposts beyond Asia to the Caribbean and Central and South America. The modern coffee belt now spans the equator, and five of the top ten largest global producers today are in Latin America, including Guatemala.

The colonization of tea developed in tandem with the colonization of coffee. In some instances where coffee had failed to flourish more widely, it was supplanted with tea. This was the case in Sri Lanka, where a plague of coffee fungus damaged much of the coffee-growing landscape and created an opening for tea. The British East India Company had become intertwined in the Chinese tea trade in the 1800s, and in their quest to control the production of this popular commodity, they established the plantation-style model for tea production. During this period, the British developed tea plantations throughout the British empire in Asia, and then about a century later introduced tea to Kenya.¹⁸ Thus, the global proliferation of tea can be seen as a byproduct of the empire-driven British, whose tea plantations spanned from India to Myanmar through Sri Lanka and eventually to East Africa.

In the context of colonialization, which initiated the widespread cultivation of coffee and tea around the equator, land was stolen and local populations were enslaved and indentured. During this period, the structural inequities of colonization directed the form of the early era of the global tea and coffee trade. Coffee and tea were reliant on many human hands for the harvest. As a result, the profitability of these early industries was heavily dependent on the exploitation and enslavement of indigenous and marginalized communities. These workers, they lived on-site in extremely impoverished conditions, as many still do today, their lives governed by the quantity of leaves or cherries plucked. The plantation model, while immensely profitable, only served to create a system of deeply entrenched inequity that is only now beginning to be acknowledged, addressed, and altered.¹⁹

The Seeds of Transformation

Many of the structural inequities of colonial attitudes, trading practices, and infrastructure remain in both the coffee and tea industries. However, a variety of forces are restructuring how these beverages are produced, traded, and consumed. The seeds of these changes, which began in the colonial era, hinted at the moral imperative that now undergirds the modern coffee and tea industries. Even during this period, there was dismay voiced at the model that was created in the coffee and tea industries. One of the most famous examples was the fictional book called Max Havelaar, written by Multatali about a Dutch coffee broker who campaigned against corruption and inequality in the colonial coffee trade in Indonesia.²⁰ It is not surprising that more than a century later the first Fairtrade-certified coffee company, Max Havelaar, was created and launched in 1989. The Dutch company takes its namesake from this symbolic colonial administrator who struggled to end the exploitation of the Indonesian peasantry in the coffee industry. Max Havelaar Coffee is emblematic of the wider shift that has taken place over the last few centuries from colonial conquest to fairer modes of trade.

The incubation of the fair trade movement is one of the early markers of this incremental shift in business practices away from the colonial model. While originally focused on the coffee industry, the modern fair trade system has spread to tea and other commodities so as to provide a safety net for coffee farmers by offering a fair price, as its name suggests. In addition, the system originally sought to promote environmentally sustainable growing practices, human rights (from gender equity to ending child labor), and it incentivized the creation and support of farmer-led agricultural cooperative organizations. In fact, it still does today. Fairtrade has grown from a social movement of patchwork grassroots organizations and non-profits in the early 20th century, to a market-based industry that serves more than 1.6 million farmers and workers with global sales that have surpassed 8.95 billion dollars.²¹ As an aside to avoid future confusion, the general term for the concept of fair trade is uncapitalized, whereas named organizations are capitalized, such as Fairtrade International and Fairtrade USA.

The fair trade movement's success has been in the support of small-holder farmers and their cooperatives. While the history of the cooperative is much longer, the rise of modern cooperative agricultural organizations across the global south during the 1960s and 1970s has provided an institutional infrastructure to support small-holder farmers at each stage of the production process. The fair trade model has changed and evolved. Originally the program was limited to certifying small-holder farmer organizations in an effort to create a niche market. The system was broadly envisioned as a development mechanism to address entrenched rural poverty amongst agricultural communities by supporting economic, social, and environmental j...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Introduction: A Brewing Novice
• Part I: The History
• Part II: The Farmers Reform
• Part III: The Industries Evolve
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index