farms were established by coffee seeds and plants acquired from Yemen, rather than Ethiopia. So as commercial coffee production spread globally in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the rust fungus was contained in Ethiopia. There was no rust to impede the development of coffee cultivation in Africa, Asia, and the Americas—especially on intensive plantations. In the absence of the rust, coffee flourished in places where it would have otherwise been impossible.
The first wave of the rust, which lasted almost a century, was decisively shaped by European colonialism. The first outbreak was recorded in Ceylon, in 1869. Over the next century, it spread through Europe’s tropical colonies in Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. These were fundamentally colonial epidemics; the rust spread through the networks of empire that linked previously isolated coffeelands ever more tightly. Spores of the fungus traveled on the wind and also stowed away on steamships, railroads, and airplanes. They were carried on the bodies of planters, laborers, and others who moved within and between the coffeelands. The fungus found purchase on the booming colonial coffee plantations, where it often found dense monocultures on which to feed and propagate. Within a decade of the first outbreak, the rust had caused the collapse of Ceylon’s coffee industry and seriously harmed production across the Eastern Hemisphere. It destroyed most of East Africa’s emergent coffee farms and limited global arabica production to a few highland enclaves where the fungus could be managed.
Colonial governments debated about how best to support coffee farmers, or even whether to do so. Each state emphasized some measures over others, depending on a range of considerations such as the intensity of the outbreak, the control measures available, the economic and political importance of the coffee industry, and broader ideas about the state’s obligations to farmers. In Ceylon, the imperial government (grudgingly) sent Harry Marshall Ward to study the problem. While Ward conducted brilliant and innovative experiments on the rust, he could not offer any effective means of controlling the outbreak. The government was unwilling to support any further research or to offer the planters any other support, so they were left to their own devices. In contrast, the colonial state in the Dutch East Indies was much more willing to support its coffee farmers. Researchers at the coffee experiment station in Dutch Java conducted pioneering studies on resistance and on breeding commercially viable strains of robusta coffee, which was widely adopted as a replacement for the devastated stands of arabica. But in spite of this research, effective controls remained elusive, and the rust contributed decisively to a broader decline in arabica coffee production in the Eastern Hemisphere.12
The second 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
