March 9, 2011
Leah Nash for The New York Times
Stumptown coffeehouse in Portland, Ore. Coffee prices are going up and up, as fast-rising demand in China and India puts pressure on the world's growers to increase their supplies. But, as detailed in a Times article by Elisabeth Rosenthal, farmers in a prime growing region of Colombia are finding that more intense rainstorms and warmer temperatures are making it harder to produce enough Arabica, the high-grade shade-grown varietal prized by those societies that can afford it.
While "peak coffee" may not be the same as peak oil, coffee is a commodity like no other. How will the heated market affect the ever evolving culture of coffee connoisseurship? What does history tell us about the role of coffee in unifying communities and advancing civilization, let alone in keeping everyone awake?
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A Renewable Resource
Updated March 9, 2011, 09:42 PM
Eugene N. Anderson is an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of “Everyone Eats" and of "Caffeine and Culture," an article in "Drugs, Labor and Colonial Expansion," edited by William Jankowiak and Daniel Bradburd.
In the short run, the shortage of good coffee will merely mean that people will plant more good coffee. This has happened many times in the past. Coffee is one of those classic commodities, like beef, that goes through cycles: when expensive, people grow more, but the crop takes a few years to mature, by which time the plantings have produced a glut, so people cut production, and the cycle starts over again. Every economics textbook discusses this.
Coffee, unlike oil, can be replaced, so the connoisseurship culture is in no danger. .At present, we observe that countries like Mexico are trying -- slowly and with some setbacks -- to upgrade from low-quality coffee to good shade-grown Arabica. Other countries, notably China and Vietnam, could easily follow this route. Others have lots of Arabica already but could expand plantings enormously. So I doubt if this shortage is for the long term. Unlike oil, coffee can be increased worldwide.
Coffee is a unique commodity. Basically, that's because it's the best way to wake yourself up. Tea is fine too but somewhat less convenient and often made rather weak. Chocolate has too many calories -- you can't very well drink a dozen cups of it in a morning. The wake-up aspects of coffee made it the great social facilitator everywhere it went. It stimulates the social and intellectual side of humans, rather than putting them to sleep as alcohol tends to do.
Everywhere it has gone, informal but real ceremonies have grown up around coffee, just as ceremonies (often much more formal and even sacred) have grown up around other caffeine sources: tea, chocolate and yerba mate.
Incidentally, in dramatic contrast to wine, coffee has never been worshiped. Tea is associated with religion in East Asia, but not really worshiped as such. (By contrast, chocolate was an extremely sacred drink, used in the highest and most solemn rituals, in pre-Columbian Mexico and Central America.) Thus, rising taste in the arts of life generally mean that people want better coffee, tea and chocolate — connoisseurship of all three has developed in parallel in the Western world over the last 30 years.
This is bound to put upward pressure on prices, as demand growth outpaces supply, but the normal laws of economics more or less guarantee a corresponding increase in supply in the near future.
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