Coffee Is Not Forever. Stuart McCook

Figure 1.4. Branch of rust-infected coffee tree, showing malformed coffee cherries and dieback, Costa Rica. (Photo by author)

      Themes

      This story follows the global odyssey of the rust fungus from its home in the forests of southwestern Ethiopia, to its first spectacular outbreak in Ceylon, and then its spasmodic century-long journey across the global coffeelands. In each region, I move the focus outward from the fungus to consider how the coffee landscapes, societies, and economies shaped the rust outbreaks and the responses to them.⁵ Histories of tropical commodities typically focus on vertical linkages, which follow the commodity from plantation to cup, from producers in the Global South to consumers in the Global North. Here, I offer a horizontal approach to the history of commodities: the rust reveals the evolving—and deepening—connections among people and landscapes across the Global South. Just as global coffee markets became more tightly connected and interdependent over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so too did global coffee producers.⁶

      This horizontal history of coffee reveals the complex connections between coffee’s life as a commodity and its life as a plant. The global coffee rust epidemic was triggered by a historically specific conjuncture of political, economic, social, technological, and environmental processes. It was, at first, a product of conquest, of empire, of liberalism, of steamships, and of migrations, both free and forced. These processes, among others, reconfigured the relations between H. vastatrix, the coffee plant, and the coffee landscapes in ways that favored a global epidemic. The coffee rust was not an isolated event; it was just one of a series of crop epidemics—commodity diseases—that started to break out at the same time, for many of the same reasons. The mosaic disease (a virus) wreaked havoc on global sugar production, while witches’ broom and monilia decimated cacao production in places. Banana growers grappled with new global diseases like fusarium and sigatoka. These diseases could be devastating; in Central America even the powerful United Fruit Company struggled to maintain banana production in the face of fusarium and sigatoka.⁷

      Commodity diseases have, in places, changed the global dynamics of commodity production. Producers in disease-free regions often had a significant advantage over producers in diseased regions, who had to contend with declining yields and the financial and logistical burdens of disease control. Even before the rust broke out, coffee growers in Asia and the Pacific struggled to compete against Brazil, whose coffeelands outproduced everyone else’s. The rust outbreak simply helped consolidate Brazil’s advantage. But the larger history of the rust also suggests that such regional advantages are temporary. Over time, the rust made its way around the world. Other significant diseases and pests, driven by the same forces as the rust, followed. The coffee berry borer (known as the broca in Spanish and Portuguese) traveled across the South Atlantic from Africa to Brazil in the 1920s and, since the 1970s, has spread through Central America. As coffee cultivation continues, farmers have to grapple with an accumulating array of local and global diseases and pests. Like the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, coffee farmers must run faster and faster just to stay in place.⁸

      Coffee farmers—from smallholders to owners of estates—have never simply been passive victims of the disease. From the beginning, they innovated creatively and continuously in their quest to control the rust. They discovered and propagated rust-tolerant or rust-resistant coffees, some of which scientists would later use as stock for breeding programs. Well-heeled farmers bought exotic coffees at tropical nurseries in Europe’s capital cities; some enterprising planters even organized collecting expeditions of their own. They experimented with virtually every chemical known or suspected to control crop diseases. They manured their farms and—depending on their situation and their particular understanding of the disease—they increased or reduced the amount of shade. They debated the causes of the rust; in Ceylon, the farmers who practiced what they called “high cultivation” blamed other farmers for the devastation caused by the rust. In Africa, European settlers sometimes blamed African farmers for infecting their farms with the rust. Debates about rust control have always been embedded in broader, intensely moralistic debates about good farming practices. Both individually and collectively, farmers searched for explanations for the outbreak and for strategies to coexist with it. Now, as then, farmers adopted whatever control methods best suited their particular situations, both economic and ecological.

      Some places gradually developed administrative and scientific infrastructures to coordinate collective responses to the rust. Before World War II, these included imperial and colonial botanical gardens, ministries of agriculture, and national coffee institutes. After the war, this infrastructure grew to include multilateral research organizations—especially Portugal’s Coffee Rust Research Centre (CIFC), bilateral and multilateral development organizations such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID), nongovernmental organizations, and private corporations. From the very beginning, these institutions have operated as an informal and decentralized yet powerful research network. Experts across the global coffeelands have constantly shared knowledge, technologies, and germplasm. This has been true ever since 1869, when the naturalist George Thwaites first sent samples of rust-infected leaves from Ceylon to the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew for analysis. Each contributed something to the growing global pool of knowledge about the rust, and in turn each benefited from the knowledge developed elsewhere. This openness may seem surprisingly altruistic—and it was—but it was also pragmatic. Most coffee research institutions were, and remain, small and inadequately funded. It was in their interest to share as much as they could and to learn how other communities were responding to the rust.⁹

      Scientists have, from the very beginning, sought to understand the fungus and how it behaved in the field. In the 1880s, Harry Marshall Ward used the latest techniques in laboratory and field biology to demonstrate that the disease was caused by the fungus and to explain how cropping practices shaped rust outbreaks. Over the twentieth century, scientists have continued to refine and complicate our understanding of the rust’s ecology in wild and cultivated ecosystems. They have also shed new light on the biology of the fungus and the genetics of rust resistance and virulence. They collected and circulated new varieties and species of coffee around the world; botanical gardens across the tropics built collections of coffee varieties, which formed the raw material for selection and breeding programs. Breeding was a long-term process that involved brute-force, large-scale systematic trial and error over years and sometimes decades. Researchers in the Dutch East Indies, for example, developed commercially viable selections of robusta. Starting in the 1960s, Portuguese researchers developed the Timor hybrid, a rust-resistant coffee that was the foundation for research. More recently, a network of researchers at the US-based World Coffee Research has been developing new F₁ hybrid coffees by blending classical breeding and selection with some of the latest biotechnologies. Scientific research is also vital to localizing tools and technologies developed elsewhere. For example, chemical fungicides have to be applied at just the right moment in the fungus’s life cycle, which is shaped by local conditions. So the optimal time for spraying in Kenya, for example, is not necessarily the same as that in Costa Rica. In these ways and others, science has helped farmers around the world sustain production in the face of the rust.

      Even so, science alone has seldom been a panacea, and relations between scientists and farmers have not always worked smoothly. Over the nineteenth century, scientists learned