Coffee Is Not Forever. Stuart McCook
of South Asia. The “coffee bug” that appeared in Ceylon in the early 1840s was previously unknown in Ceylon; apparently these insects were first detected on “plants near coolie lines” of laborers from southern India. Some planters argued that the insect emerged spontaneously in poorly cultivated plantations. Others, however, attributed the introduction of the bug to “Mocha” coffee plants imported from Bombay. George Gardner, the botanist of the Peradeniya Botanic Garden, noted that the insect had not been present on the island five years before. The planters also noticed that the outbreaks of the bug were associated with outbreaks of a fungus. The naturalist Miles Berkeley concurred, noting that “there is a great reason to believe that many of these plagues are in the first instance imported, and we know that some vegetable productions of foreign extraction and some insects also become peculiarly luxuriant and abundant in their new quarters.”60
The entomologist John Nietner disputed this idea. “With reference to this comparatively recent appearance of the bug in the island,” he wrote, “it has been suggested that it was not indigenous, but had been introduced with seed-coffee, from some other country.” But he argued that the bugs were indigenous, noting that he had seen the white coffee bug “upon orange, guava, and other trees,” while the brown bug “attacks almost every plant and tree that grows on a coffee estate, more particularly though those that are grown on gardens.”61 Nietner did not explain why the outbreaks occurred at that particular time, but he was clearly aware that they were connected to prevailing farming practices.
Significantly, Nietner was also aware of the broader global context of these outbreaks, noting that “at about the same time [as the bug outbreaks in Ceylon] the potato, vine, and olive disease[s] became very alarming in Europe.”62 This was a historical moment in which microorganisms were becoming increasingly mobile. It was in these years, for example, that the potato blight made its way from South America to Europe and cholera spread from India to Europe and later the Americas.63 Microbes like these traveled on the same modern transportation infrastructure that swiftly moved goods and people around the globe.
Yet for the first half of the nineteenth century, at least, the coffee plant (and by extension the coffee rust) did not circulate. There was little incentive for coffee planters, large or small, to move the coffee plant. It had been so widely distributed in the eighteenth century that further long-distance transfers were unnecessary. Coffee planters almost everywhere could easily obtain planting material locally and saw little advantage to acquiring it from afar. In Ceylon and Southern India, for example, coffee planters obtained planting material from plants that had escaped into the forest, or they purchased planting material from local farmers. Long-distance transfers of coffee began anew in the 1870s, when Europeans found a new species of coffee—Liberian coffee—in West Africa.64
By the late 1860s, the pioneering phase of coffee cultivation was ending in India, Ceylon, and Java—the region’s three largest producers. In Ceylon, most of the viable coffeelands were occupied by the mid-1870s. In India, the coffee zones in Mysore and Coorg were similarly almost fully occupied. “Comparatively little land suitable for planting purposes now remains in the hands of the government in either the Neilgherries, Coorg, or Wynaad,” wrote Edmund Hull in 1877, “while there is great difficulty in securing what there is at any price, except under the most stringent conditions.”65 George Watt wrote that the coffee tracts of Southern India “extend in nearly an unbroken line along the summits and slopes of the Western Ghauts, from the northern limits of Mysore down to Cape Comorin.”66 Java was ringed with a coffee belt extending from 600 to 1,200–1,400 meters above sea level.67 The ecological limits of coffee cultivation—as defined by a combination of temperature, rainfall, and climate—had been reached. Nonetheless, coffee planters in these places continued to open new farms in marginal lands or migrate to new frontiers. Some astute planters began to question the long-term viability of the pioneering estate model, which treated forest landscapes and their soils as nonrenewable resources. Hull questioned the “great and serious difficulties in the way of keeping up that constant, unremitting care and culture which appear necessary to maintain in a state of perfect health a plant, which, however hardy in some respects, is after all an exotic in our Indian settlements, and is moreover being grown under a forced and artificial system.”68 Hull found an alternative model in the native farms, some of which contained “trees of an age far beyond the power of the oldest inhabitant to define, and which have very probably been flourishing for generations.”69 Unfortunately, it seems that Hull’s voice was in the minority.
BY THE mid-nineteenth century, the intensification of production had left the world’s coffee farms highly vulnerable to diseases and pests. This vulnerability was itself a product of coffee’s history as a commodity. In the wild, arabica coffee and the H. vastatrix fungus lived concomitantly, 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.