to cause urinary incontinence in the elderly, and has been found (with unknown effects) in the systems of new-born infants who do not have the necessary liver enzyme to metabolize it. There is also evidence to suggest that caffeine can cause osteoporosis as it increases the rate of calcium elimination from the body. On the plus side, caffeine is used to treat neonatal apnoea (cessation of the spontaneous breathing of an infant) and to increase sperm mobility.
It is remarkable that we voluntarily introduce this powerful drug into our systems knowing so little about what it might be doing to us. While the producing countries face ruin, the West, so the gainsayers maintain, has become a dangerously caffeinated society. The cheap, coarse-flavoured Robusta coffees that are dragging world prices down contain twice as much caffeine as higher quality Arabicas. There are the first signs that the effect of the increased use of these Robusta coffees in blends is causing a slowdown in consumption, as coffee drinkers, consciously or unconsciously troubled by the stronger caffeine hit of their usual brew, are drinking less coffee. The impact of health and quality issues on coffee consumption may yet add another problematic dimension to a coffee trade that is already in turmoil.
The explosive growth of the ‘specialty’ coffee market, led by the USA, may represent the only future survival mechanism for a few fortunate farmers. This market maintains its upward momentum largely through the ability of the coffee roasters’ buyers to single out distinguished, high-quality coffee producers in countries of origin. Since the price of ‘commodity’ coffee has been so low for so long, there is a real prospect that even producers of quality Arabicas may be unable to continue in the trade. However, a few coffees may rise from their ranks to become specialty coffees, their historical and gustatory qualities nurtured by buyers and thus be capable of fetching viable prices. Many are called but few are chosen; as a result, the discrepancy between the price that a specialty buyer is willing to pay for such a coffee and the more run-of-the-mill types is increasing. It is feared by many in the trade that this will quickly lead to a two-tier coffee market for producers and consumers alike, one in which the vast majority of coffee is of a low quality – probably Brazilian and Vietnamese – sold competitively to cost-conscious consumers, and a small amount is marketed as a refined, luxury item for the true aficionado. This polarization will weigh particularly heavily on the producers of good-quality but not necessarily very distinguished Arabicas. Thus mainstream Arabica coffees from countries such as Honduras, Ethiopia, or El Salvador are largely ignored by the specialty market because they lack distinction either of flavour or pedigree, and as a result they are forced to compete with Brazil and Vietnam.
Coffee has always marched hand in hand with colonialism through the pages of history. It was once known as the ‘Wine of Araby’, and the trade in coffee was an important component in the creation and consolidation of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. It was first consumed in the late fifteenth century as a sacred ritual amongst the Sufis in Yemen, whence it quickly spread through Islam. In that religion, despite some initial opposition, it was considered an acceptable stimulant because, unlike the reviled alcohol, it never left the drinker ‘incapable of distinguishing a man from a woman or the earth from the heavens’. The popular coffee houses of Cairo and Constantinople attracted the attention of the first European visitors to the Orient, and eventually coffee itself appeared in most of Europe at the same time as merchants, sailors, and adventurers from that continent were starting to establish, largely through superiority of arms and technology, their fledgling trading empires. Coffee was amongst a number of valuable and desirable oriental goods that they sought, but its supply was effectively under the monopolistic control of Ottomans. By the early eighteenth century the Dutch, the French, and the British had managed to obtain coffee seedlings to take to their own tropical colonial possessions, there to be cultivated under the plantation system worked by slave or near-slave labour. Slavery, with its attendant horrors, persisted as the preferred method of coffee production in many colonies until abolition, or in the case of Brazil until as recently as 1888, by which time coffee had become a thoroughly globalized commodity. The so-called benefits of the colonial plantation system were mainly experienced by the consumers in the home countries of these various European empires, who responded with alacrity to the low price and ready availability of what had formerly been a rare luxury.
Coffee had become universally consumed in the nations of Europe and in the USA, much of it in coffee houses that became meeting places for men of commerce, politics, and culture. The effect of caffeine itself ensured that there were always likely to be lively, well-informed debates and intense, original exchanges, in contrast to the only other public meeting places of the time, the tavern or the church. The coffee house played a pivotal role in the creation of many of the financial institutions that in turn supported the expansionist trading empires that had led to the growth of coffee consumption in the first place. Lloyds of London, the maritime insurance company, emerged from the interests of the clientele of Lloyds Coffee House who gathered there to exchange news and gossip concerning the movement of ships. Coffee was an important commodity shipped from afar, and thus the fledgling insurance business conducted at Lloyds in part provided the financial structure whereby the risks of the coffee trade itself could be mitigated. This feedback loop of cause-and-effect, fuelled by caffeine, underpinned the dramatic rise of capitalism and its most successful offspring, globalization. Coffee lay at the very heart of the triumph of free-market economics in our times: that it is now suffering the awful consequences of that same ethos is ironic, but horribly apt.
With the dieback of former European imperialism, and the increasing assertion of the hegemony of the USA over the western hemisphere, the many coffee-producing countries of Central and South America have found themselves overtaken by US neocolonialism. Many of those countries are deeply dependent on coffee for export income, and because their northern neighbour consumes 25 per cent of the world’s supplies but chooses to buy 75 per cent of its needs from their southern neighbours, inevitably coffee became a significant factor in hemispherical geopolitics. Economies that are historically coffee-based have created the ground rules by which a ruling oligarchy can impose its will on the unrepresented masses. The sweatshop economies of much of Central America and the Caribbean depend upon the political élite’s control of the media and the military apparatus, and the structure of the coffee trade provided the working model. El Salvador, for example, a country which until recently was dependent on coffee for over half its export income, now derives 57 per cent of that from the ‘garment industry’. Arguably, along with the world economy as a whole, the coffee trade has reverted to a paradigm that more closely resembles the height of the European colonialism, albeit now under US domination, than the protectionism that prevailed during the era when strong, liberal, democratic Western nation states allied against the threat of Communism. The fact that the date of the dissolution of the International Coffee Agreement broadly coincided with that of the fall of the Berlin Wall is by no means coincidental: the USA, having vanquished its most serious rival, no longer saw the need to humour its more liberal allies.
The catalytic effect of coffee-house culture on the emergence of those financial and cultural institutions that underpinned the rise of Western capitalism should not be underestimated. The coffee houses of the City of London were the progenitors of such global institutions as the Stock Exchange and Lloyds, and those of Covent Garden and St James’s were the seedbeds of the Royal Society and the Enlightenment. Coffee gradually gave way to tea in England, but the imposition of taxes on tea in the American colonies precipitated the Boston Tea Party, the actual as well as the ideological rejection of tea, and the triumph of coffee in America, where coffee houses became the foremost meeting places for merchants, politicians, and businessmen. The Declaration of Independence was first read publicly outside the Merchant’s Coffee House in Philadelphia, and President-elect George Washington was ceremonially welcomed to New York in front of (another) Merchant’s Coffee House – which had, amongst other things, formerly hosted slave auctions – a week before his inauguration. If he had been able to walk from there but a few hundred yards and a couple of centuries in time he would have come to the Coffee, Sugar and Cocoa Exchange in 4, World Trade Center, which was to be destroyed in the 9/11 attacks masterminded by Osama bin Laden, whose forbears came from Yemen, itself the original home of the coffee trade. One of the purported reasons why the World Trade Center was targeted was because the towers were a symbol of the Western
