Coffee Series

Uncommon Grounds by Mark Pendergrast, 1999, Excerpts

Coffee production exploded from 5.5 million bags in 1890 to 16.3 million in 1901. Coffee planting doubled in the decade following abolition, and by the turn of the century over 500 million coffee trees grew in the state of Sao Paulo. Brazil flooded the world with coffee. This over reliance on one crop had a direct effect on the well-being of most Brazilians.

The ecological historian Warren Dean in his book [The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest] documents the devastating affect that coffee had on Brazil’s environment. During the winter months of May, June, and July, gangs of workers would begin at the base of a hill, chopping through the trunks just enough to leave them standing. “Then it was the foreman’s task to decide which was the master tree, the giant that would be cut all the way through, bringing down all the others with it,” Dean writes. “If he succeeded, the entire hillside collapsed with a tremendous explosion, raising clouds of debris, and swarms of parrots, toucans, and songbirds.” After drying for a few weeks, the felled giants were set afire.

At the end of this conflagration, a temporary fertilizer of ash on top of the virgin soil gave a jump-start for year-old coffee seedlings, grown in shaded nurseries from hand-pulped seeds before transplanted. The coffee, grown in full sun rather than shade, sucked nutrition out of the depleting humus layer rather quickly. Cultivation practices guaranteed wildly fluctuating harvests. Coffee trees always take a rest the year after a heavy bearing season, but Brazilian conditions exacerbated the phenomenon. When the land was “tired,” it was simply abandoned and new swathes of forest were then cleared. Unlike the northern arboreal forests, these tropical rain forests, once destroyed, would take centuries to regenerate.

By the late nineteenth century the Rio coffee lands were dying. The Rio region was “quickly ruined by a plant whose destructive form of cultivation left forests razed, natural reserves exhausted, and general decadence in its wake,” wrote Eduardo Galeano in Open Veins in Latin America. “Previously virgin lands were pitilessly eroded as the plunder-march of coffee advanced.”

Coffee Series

Uncommon Grounds by Mark Pendergrast, 1999, Excerpts

As the European powers brought coffee cultivation to their colonies, the intensive labor required to grow, harvest, and process coffee came from imported slaves. Slaves had initially been brought to the Caribbean to harvest sugar cane, and the history of sugar is intimately tied to that of coffee. It was this cheap sweetener that made the bitter boiled brew palatable to many consumers, and that added a quick energy lift to the stimulus of caffeine.

The coffee, therefore, that fueled Voltaire and Diderot was produced by the most inhuman form of coerced labor. A former San Domingo slave recalled treatment under French masters: “Have they not hung men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat shit?”

Brazil

Over the half century before 1900, non-native coffee conquered Brazil, Venezuela, and most of Central America as well as a good portion of India, Ceylon, Java, and Colombia. In the process, the bean helped shape laws and governments, delayed the abolition of slavery, exacerbated social inequities, affected the natural environment, and provided the engine for growth, especially in Brazil, which became the dominant force in the coffee world during this period.

What happened in Brazil exemplifies the benefits and hazards of relying on one product. Coffee made modern Brazil, but at an enormous human and environmental cost. The Portuguese proceeded to destroy much of that paradise. The sugar plantations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had established the pattern of huge plantations owned by the elite, where slaves worked in unimaginably awful conditions. It was cheaper to import new slaves than to maintain the health of existing laborers, and as a result, slaves died after an average of seven years.

Although some plantation owners treated their slaves decently, others forced them into private sadistic orgies. Beatings and murders were not subject to public scrutiny, and slaves were buried on plantations without death certificates. Slave children were frequently sold away from parents.

Brazil maintained slavery longer than any other country in the Western hemisphere. In 1871, Pedro II declared the “law of the free womb” specifying that all newborn offspring of slaves from then on would be free. He thus guaranteed a gradual extinction of slavery. Even so, growers and politicians fought against abolition. “Brazil is coffee,” one Brazilian member of parliament declared in 1880, “and coffee is the Negro.”

Money – Songs and Poems Selection

The Pretender by Jackson Brown

I'm going to rent myself a house
In the shade of the freeway
I'm going to pack my lunch in the morning
And go to work each day
And when the evening rolls around
I'll go on home and lay my body down
And when the morning light comes streaming in
I'll get up and do it again
Amen
Say it again
Amen

I want to know what became of the changes
We waited for love to bring
Were they only the fitful dreams
Of some greater awakening
I've been aware of the time going by
They say in the end it's the wink of an eye
And when the morning light comes streaming in
You'll get up and do it again
Amen

Caught between the longing for love
And the struggle for the legal tender
Where the sirens sing and the church bells ring
And the junk man pounds his fender
Where the veterans dream of the fight
Fast asleep at the traffic light
And the children solemnly wait
For the ice cream vendor
Out into the cool of the evening
Strolls the Pretender
He knows that all his hopes and dreams
Begin and end there

Ah the laughter of the lovers
As they run through the night
Leaving nothing for the others
But to choose off and fight
And tear at the world with all their might
While the ships bearing their dreams
Sail out of sight

I'm going to find myself a girl
Who can show me what laughter means
And we'll fill in the missing colors
In each other's paint-by-number dreams
And then we'll put out dark glasses on
And we'll make love until our strength is gone
And when the morning light comes streaming in
We'll get up and do it again
Get it up again

I'm going to be a happy idiot
And struggle for the legal tender
Where the ads take aim and lay their claim
To the heart and the soul of the spender
And believe in whatever may lie
In those things that money can buy
Thought true love could have been a contender
Are you there?
Say a prayer for the Pretender
Who started out so young and strong
Only to surrender