yet the fungus did not cause serious harm to the plant. The disease was kept in check by the structure of Ethiopia’s forest ecosystem and likely also by fungi that parasitized H. vastatrix. By accident or design, the coffee plant was transferred to Yemen without the rust. From Yemen, rust-free arabica coffee was then dispersed across the global tropics. The coffee plant prospered as it was cultivated in diverse ecosystems that were largely free of significant diseases and pests, at least initially. This ecological Pax arabica eroded as the scope and scale of coffee cultivation intensified over the nineteenth century. As production increased, monocultures became much more important, especially in the world’s largest producers—Brazil, Java, and Ceylon. These monocultures were highly productive over the short term. In the absence of any pests or pathogens that could take advantage of this vulnerability, the coffee plants prospered. But these landscapes were also highly susceptible, as Ceylon’s coffee planters would discover after 1869.
CHAPTER 3
The Epicenter
Ceylon
THE GLOBAL rust epidemic began, without fanfare, on a coffee farm in a small corner of Ceylon. Early in 1869, a farmer in the Madulsima district noticed some orange spots on the leaves of a few of his coffee trees. By mid-1869, the fungus had spread from a few trees to several acres. Over the next two years, the fungus engulfed the island’s coffee farms. “The rapidity with which this coffee leaf disease has spread throughout the coffee districts on the Island,” wrote George H. K. Thwaites, the director of the Royal Botanical Garden at Peradeniya, “has been perfectly marvelous.” “It is probable,” he continued, “that not a single estate has quite escaped, though it appeared in a very slight degree on some.”1 In the years that followed, the rust gradually wreaked havoc on Ceylon’s coffee production. The photograph below (fig. 3.1) shows the Madulsima district just a few years after the rust was first reported. It shows some planters and laborers walking through a field of young coffee; the plants are waist high. Looking closely at the photo, the trunks and branches of the coffee plants are visible, suggesting that the plants may have been heavily defoliated.
Figure 3.1. Planters and laborers walking through a coffee estate, Ceylon. (Samuel Bourne and Charles Shepherd, View from Mr. Jenkins’ Coffee Estate, Madoolseema, Ceylon, 1872, Hume Collection, Photographs of Southern India and Ceylon, the British Library, Archives and Manuscripts. © Granger)
Farmers in Ceylon had been cultivating and exporting coffee for global markets since the eighteenth century, when the island was under Dutch rule. Ironically, most coffee produced in Ceylon under Dutch rule came from the one part of the island that was not directly under Dutch control: the highland Kingdom of Kandy. Under Dutch rule, Sinhalese farmers exported between 37,000 and 100,000 pounds of coffee per year. Coffee production boomed after the British took control of the island after the Napoleonic Wars. Between 1830 and 1880, Ceylon was the world’s third-largest producer of coffee. The colonial government eliminated export duties on coffee and exempted coffeelands from tax. They built roads, and later railroads, that linked the highlands of Kandy with the coast.2
At first, this sparked a boom in Sinhalese coffee production. At least some of this was produced using traditional farming techniques. Sinhalese farmers tended to farm coffee under shade and at lower altitudes, sometimes as low as sea level. “In these cases,” wrote Hull, “the plants will invariably be found growing under the shade of the jack, cocoa-nut, or other suitable trees, without which protection all chance of their thriving permanently would be out of the question.” These farms were also “limited in extent, and are generally richly manured and often well watered during the dry season.”3 According to some accounts, they also cultivated coffee in small patches around their villages. James Webb persuasively argues that during the 1820s and 1830s, some Sinhalese farmers adopted more intensive production techniques, supported by a series of policy changes by the colonial government to encourage local production. This intensification involved clearing highland chena lands and forests to take advantage of their rich soils. Webb estimates that they must have cleared some 60,000 acres of forest for coffee production, sometimes bringing them into conflict with British coffee planters.4
Although the earliest British estates were established in the 1820s, the estate boom did not began in earnest until the 1840s. Spurred by rising coffee prices in Europe and North America, Europeans (mostly Britons) started aggressively clearing the steep slopes of Ceylon’s highland forests. In 1840, the colonial government decreed that Ceylon’s highland forests belonged to the Crown. Over the next several decades, much of this land was sold to settlers for coffee production. Most of the colonists had little previous experience with farming coffee, or indeed, farming of any kind. Like estate coffee producers in other parts the world, they sought to maximize productivity and profitability. “It is generally admitted,” observed the planter William Sabonadière, “that nothing equals virgin forest land for the cultivation of coffee.” The trees were cleared so that coffee could be cultivated on the rich forest soils. At first, farmers often obtained arabica seeds and seedlings from neighboring Sinhalese farms. The estates were usually planted without shade, since shade reduced yields. By the late 1880s, 600,000 acres of forest had been cleared for coffee. “The lovely sloping forests are going,” wrote the novelist Anthony Trollope on a visit to Ceylon, “and the very regular but ugly coffee plantations are taking their place.” Between 1849 and 1868, annual coffee exports tripled, from roughly 330,000 hundredweight to 1,000,000 hundredweight (16,700 metric tons to 50,800 metric tons).5
The “most fruitful coffee districts,” according to Edmund Hull, were in the highlands between 2,500 and 3,500 feet (roughly 750–1,050 meters), although estates could be found at altitudes between 50 and 1,500 meters. Like coffee planters everywhere in the early nineteenth century, farmers on Ceylon (both Sinhalese and European) pushed arabica coffee to its ecological limits. They managed the plant as best they could by manipulating the conditions under which it was cultivated. In these respects, Ceylon was just as vulnerable to the rust as other coffee zones around the world. In another respect, however, it was even more vulnerable. Ceylon’s climate was unusually wet and windy. The summer monsoon (May–September) and the winter monsoon (December–February) showered the island with rain and exposed it to winds that could exceed 100 kilometers per hour. Rain also fell regularly during the intermonsoonal period. Ceylon’s wet climate, then, turned its coffee farms into a vast incubator for the coffee rust. And the strong and regular winds ensured that when the rust appeared, it would spread rapidly through the island and beyond.6
The Search for Origins
The early history of the rust in Ceylon remains murky. Some observers contended that the rust fungus was native to Ceylon, arguing that the epidemic had been triggered by the introduction of C. arabica. The rust’s supposed wild host was a plant then known as Coffea travancorensis (now classified as Psilanthus travancorensis), a plant closely related to coffee and indigenous to Ceylon and Southern India. Thwaites, who had been studying Ceylon’s fungi for almost a decade, argued that this was unlikely because he only found the rust on C. travancorensis after the epidemic had already broken out. It was more likely that C. travancorensis was infected from C. arabica, not the other way around. The naturalist John Nietner, along with several others, suggested that the rust had likely been present on coffee farms for several years before the epidemic broke out. Thwaites countered that if the rust had been present, “it is somewhat remarkable that the somewhat conspicuous orange-coloured spores on the underside of the leaves did not attract attention; and it is equally remarkable that the disease should so suddenly have assumed so very malignant a character.”7 Thwaites could not have known this, but as the rust later spread around the world, it often did pass unnoticed for several years before attracting attention—even when people were specifically
