is bolstered by the deliberate perpetuation of the myths about it – principally that it is wild and scarce – mean effectively it is worth too much economically to suppress. And that’s not just at producer level, but all the way down the supply chain.
Go online today, and you’ll see that plenty of vendors of kopi luwak have taken on board the raging controversy about this particular coffee. Taken on board, not in terms of changing their production practices (perish the thought …), but by changing their marketing. A whole new generation of false and fraudulent claims has arisen, the general gist of which is that, acutely aware of false and fraudulent claims, the vendors have declared that they have gone out of their way just for their lucky clients to source the absolute genuine article. These same traders wave their ‘Genuine Wild Kopi Luwak with Official Indonesian Government Certificate’ credentials to lend them credibility, some even posting detailed documents on their websites that are supposed to substantiate their claims. Are these certificates themselves genuine, or knocked up on a laptop on some Takengon back-street? Who knows? To adapt the translation of the famous Latin quote ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’, for this modern coffee context, ‘Who certifies the certifiers?’.
One thing is sure: if there is anything this Kopi Luwak fiasco has amply demonstrated, it is that if there is any room for fraudulent and deceitful practice in the trade, there will be.
How might a watertight certification work? I’ve met one source of genuine wild kopi luwak who has convinced me that his product is bona fide precisely because of the protocols that he has in place to ensure there is no forgery or adulteration. These include strict observation of the freshness and dietary mixture of the luwak’s scats, strict quotas (maximum sustainable production ceiling) and significant financial incentives – if you, as a smallholder, are accepted as a supplier, you’ll have long-term rewards that you’ll lose immediately and irrevocably if you attempt to cheat. And cheating may eventually become easy to prove: a Japanese scientist is currently working on a method to distinguish between wild and caged kopi luwak, which would give the certification of this product a solid foundation.
It’s interesting not only to see how modern methods can be used to tackle such animal welfare issues, but also how the same issues can have unexpected resonances with the past. One aspect of certification has an uncanny echo of the learned debates about coffee itself in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Islamic courts of Mecca and Cairo that we’ll encounter later in this book. As befits the government of the world’s largest Muslim population, when they felt that they were ready to ramp up the production of caged civet coffee through the creation of a civet-breeding programme, in 2010 the plantations in East Java applied to the Indonesian Ulema Council of Islamic clerics for a fatwa (juridical opinion) to determine whether kopi luwak was halal or haram (forbidden). In the final fatwa, it was declared that as long as certain production protocols were met (none of which mentioned the provenance of the coffee, as we’ve seen), it was judged halal, presumably to some relief.
It’s been a long road since my initial impulse purchase in Yorkshire back in 1991, and the end is not yet in sight, but consciousness about kopi luwak has certainly been raised, and that can only be for the good – eventually. In the meantime, this coffee has acquired a new name in academic circles: apparently, it’s an ‘excremental commodity’. So at least it can now be talked about without embarrassment at polite dinner parties.
A month or two ago I met an Australian coffee planter in Sri Lanka who has a hundred hectares under cultivation, high in the central mountains adjoining a forest. I told him about my involvement with kopi luwak. ‘Luwaks?’ he said, ‘Got hundreds of those little blighters running around my plantation. My guys have gathered up 40 kilos of their droppings. Dunno what to do with them!’
‘Do nothing,’ I advised him. ‘The game ain’t worth the candle.’
NOTE ON THIS NEW EDITION:
The opening chapter of this book concerns the deep coffee crisis of the early noughties. While this dire phase has thankfully passed, the wider observations made remain relevant today, and there is nothing to prevent such a crisis arising again, as indeed appears to be happening right at this moment, in a less severe incarnation. I therefore have not attempted to update the statistics I used previously to reflect current market conditions.
I see I have been bitter. But what would you think of someone who could write such things without bitterness?
‘MULTATULI’, Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (1860)
The catastrophically low price currently paid to the producers of coffee is leading to the largest enforced global lay-off of workers in history. Nonetheless, it is remarkable how little agreement there is concerning the numbers of people who are dependent on coffee growing for their livelihood. The Wall Street Journal, a newspaper not given to exaggeration in matters of business, estimated that some 125 million people depended on coffee in 2002. ActionAid claimed 60 million, Fair Trade 100 million. The World Bank has calculated that there are 25 million small producers in developing countries who depend on coffee as their sole source of income, each supporting an average of five family members: this is the equivalent of the entire population of Japan, the world’s eighth most populous country. Furthermore, the Bank estimates that a staggering 500 million people globally are involved directly or indirectly in the coffee trade. This figure is echoed by Dow Jones Commodity Services, which also assesses the importance of coffee to developed countries too: they have calculated, inter alia, that 300,000 people work in Italy’s 110,000 coffee shops, serving 70 million cups of espresso per day.
The coffee market in the USA is worth $19 billion annually, with 161 million consumers directly serviced by 150,000 full- or part-time workers. The Specialty Association of America estimates that if everyone from coffee machine mechanics to styrofoam cup makers were accounted for, the figure for those involved in the business would leap to 1.5 million. In Japan, a leading roaster has claimed that over 3 million jobs – 4.5 per cent of the workforce – are directly or indirectly related to coffee. While the industry is keen to stress the importance of coffee, if only to alert politicians to the gravity of the problems affecting it, clearly there is huge international dependence on the trade.
As long as the price that coffee fetches on the world market continues to be lower than the cost of production, smallholders and farmers must subsidize coffee consumers. They cannot do this indefinitely. The result is unemployment and the loss of livelihood on the vast scale commensurate with the numbers previously employed. Thus the World Bank estimates that between the years 2000 and 2002 some 600,000 workers in the coffee industry lost their jobs in Central America alone. This is the equivalent of the entire population of the city of Bristol becoming unemployed. With no sign of a meaningful price recovery, this employment crisis is getting much worse, rapidly and globally. It has started to cause political and social disruption, poverty and privation on an unprecedented level in countries where the national economies are frequently already extremely fragile. There has also been a fundamental shift in the recipients of the coffee trade’s largesse. In 1991 the global coffee market was worth around $30 billion, of which producing countries received $12 billion, or 40 per cent. Current figures suggest that the global revenues from coffee sales are in the region of $55 billion, of which only $7 billion (13 per cent) goes to the exporting nations. Coffee is the world’s most valuable trading commodity after oil, but the share of the coffee trade enjoyed by producers has fallen by two-thirds in ten years, whilst transnational coffee companies have reaped huge windfall profits from the low price that they now
