My coffee
obsession began when I started to understand how the fair-trade
movement was helping to improve the lives of farm families who work
very hard to produce fine coffees and who
earn very
little for their efforts. I have been fortunate enough to take students
to the
coffeelands
of Nicaragua twice and will return in 2009. I have also now visited
coffeelands in Guatemala and will tour coffee production in Brazil
before the end of this year. The coffee
index page is now the gateway to all of my coffee endeavors.
I
would love to speak about coffee
to your school or civic organization!
What is the
geography of coffee?
This is the confluence of two of my great passions: learning about the
world (geography) and enjoying a hot, bitter beverage (coffee)! In my
environmental geography course, I usually spend at least two class
sessions discussing the relationship between the beverage in my cup and
the bean on the bush. For me, coffee is an excellent jumping-off point
for understanding
natural resource conservation and exploitation, equity in international
trade, the geographic displacement of environmental problems, and
global patterns of colonization and post-colonial economic
relationships. This page is my humble contribution to the
discussion.
National
Geographic Coffee - learn about the top ten coffee-producing
countries (as of 1999) and the climate needed to grow coffee. The
NGS site was build before Vietnam became a major producer.
Amanda Briney has written a
nice introduction to the geography
of coffee for the geography
section of About.com.
This handy map is found on
a wall in the Coffee Museum in downtown
Matagalpa,
Nicaragua.
The beans are shown in the tropical locations of former colonies; the
ships represent the long-standing patterns of trade; and indigenous
people represent the connection of many coffeeland people to their
ancestral roots.
The geographic distribution of coffee production is of more than
academic interest. It so happens that coffee is deeply intertwined with
critical environmental concerns, including biodiversity and climate
change. For example, Conservation International has found that about
half of the world's biological hotspots are in coffee-growing areas.
(And on the map below, I can see at least one new coffee-growing area
that they did not include). This means that the coffee business is in a
position to make a real difference in the protection of endangered
habitat.
Because the coffee plant is very sensitive to climate, the prospect of
climate change concerns coffee farmers greatly. The United Nations
Environment Program cites the 1989 study illustrated below as an
example of this sensitivity. Researchers found that even the relatively
adaptable robusta variety
would be very vulnerable to warming. The higher-quality arabica may be even more
vulnerable. Even where coffee could survive climate changes, the local
characteristics that can define a specialty coffee are quite likely to
be lost, creating significant financial risks for growers of the best
coffees. The coffee
growing and climate change report at Coffee & Conservation
provides context and further information.
Vanderbilt ICS
Vanderbilt University has
a
long-standing reputation as a leader in Brazilian studies, beginning in
the
1940s. It may be no surprise, then, that Vanderbilt is home to the
Institute for Coffee Studies. The institute has been
focused on research on the medical aspects of
coffee. Drawing on the impressive medical infrastructure of the
university and the city of Nashville, that tradition continues, but ICS
is now housed in Vanderbilt's Center for Latin American and Iberian
Studies. The Institute's mission now includes research on health,
research on social aspects of production and consumption, and the
encouragement of economic development in coffeelands.
In March 2008, I was honored to join the institute as an affiliated
scholar. I am helping to organize its first scholarly conference,
scheduled for March 2009.
As Frank Sinatra sings, They Drink
an Awful Lot of Coffee in Brazil. I know this from
experience -- coffee seems to be offered in every corner of the
country, usually in a tiny, plastic cup as shown at the top of this
page. Brazil has been the leading exporter of coffee for
many years, currently supplying about one-fourth of the world supply.
In October 2008, I had the great pleasure of visiting the coffeelands
of Minas Gerais, where conventional farms are just beginning to move
toward specialty coffee. I also visited the key exporting zone of
Santos, spending most of my time in the Museu do
Café. The museum is housed in an opulent palace built in
1922 to
consolidate the operations of the coffee market. I was particularly
impressed by an extensive exhibit about the difficult experience of
Nippo-Brazilians, the thousands of migrants who came from Japan to
Brazil to work in coffee as slavery was ending.
During this brief tour, I learned a lot about the differences between
Brazilian and Central American coffee. In the summer of 2010, I hope to
return both to Minas Gerais and to Santos as part of a study tour that
will also include urban development in São Paulo, Curitiba, and
Florianópolis.
Banco
do Café image courtesy of Ron Wise.
This image is an important motif in the Coffee Museum.
See images of coffee on the bank notes from
throughout the world on the collection
of
Café Bueno in Santo Domingo.
Get coffee maps!
Researchers at Artisan Maps have worked for over a year to create a
coffee map of the world and four maps of coffee regions. Learn about
the connections between flavor and geography from this informative
series of Coffee Map Posters.
The US Geological Service EROS Data Center has created a GIS tool to
help buyers and sellers document certification standards and find
specialty farms in various categories. Read about the project in ArcNews.
The International Coffee Organization
is the main governing body in the coffee industry. Its web site
includes an overview of the coffee crisis and a plethora of statistics
about coffee trading.
For extensive background on the problems facing coffee farmers, see the
September 1995 issue of The New
Internationalistentitled Coffee:
Spilling the Beans, which includes almost a dozen articles on
the politics, economics, and geography of coffee.
Coffee Documentaries
I have found a growing number of audio and video documentaries that are
useful in my coffee outreach
and teaching, because they help students and other audiences to
understand the specific places in which the coffee story unfolds.
Black Gold is a feature
film that exposes the extreme disconnect between designer lattes and
the abject conditions of farmers in Ethiopia who make them possible.It
also explores the effort to ;narrow that gap through fair trade.
Black Gold
One Cup is a
30-minute film that can be viewed online, about Timor-Leste
(East Timor), one of the world's newest
countries. Few countries have suffered more than East Tmor, in
which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed or
displaced with almost no media attention.
The History Channel has
produced a good introduction to coffee entitled Modern
Marvels: Coffee.
Guatemala: The Human Price of Coffee
is an excellent introduction to the coffee crisis as it has emerged
amid the beautiful lands, rich heritage, and tragic history of highland
Central America.
THE FILM
Guatemala/Mexico: Coffee Country
is a PBS Frontline documentary about fair trade as a partial solution
to the problems farmers face. It is part of a remarkable series about
social entrepreneurs throughout the world who are finding ways to
empower communities.
The film is a brief but remarkably thorough overview of the problems
facing small farmers and how farmers can work together to enter the
fair-trade market. The 20-minute film can be viewed online, or as part
of the DVD set (Maxwell Library at BSC has several copies).
The film web site includes many extra resources, including a simple but
instructive game about the relative earnings of coffee growers,
transporters, and processors.
THE GAME
Coffee and Conflict
Coffee is grown mainly in
the former colonial lands of the low latitudes. In too many cases, the
post-colonial legacy includes inequality, uneven development, and
violence. The Coffeeland
Landmine
Victims' Trust was established to help address one particularly tragic
reminder of violence that can outlast any peace treaty. In Nicaragua,
for example, the civil wars have ended, but the land mines still lurk
in some coffee fields where they have been long forgotten.
The Trust works with
its own partners and with those already involved in the coffee industry
to provide emergency and rehabilitation services to people who are
seriously injured by mines.
Note: Although the U.S. government
has provided some support for this rehabilitation work, we are one of
the few countries that still refuses to stop using mines and cluster
bombs, both of which can kill and maim people years into the future.
To learn about the history of the coffee break in the U.S., listen to
Susan Stamberg's
Present at the Creation report from the December 2, 2002 edition of
NPR's Morning Edition (this page includes several related
links).
As with all of Nicaragua, the
coffee-growing North was a dangerous and tumultuous place at the time
of the U.S.-funded contra war.
Dreaming Nicaragua: Morning Coffee and the Contra War is an
engaging and disturbing story that comingles coffee and history.
I recently learned that the state of Rondonia
is now the sixth-largest producer of coffee in Brazil, and the second
largest
producer of the conillon variety. A
Brazzil magazine article,
Fleeing the Cold
, describes how this has come about. More detail is provided in
Chapter 6 of Nigel Smith's
Amazonia - Resiliency and Dynamism of the Land and its People.
My friends in Oxfam's Boston coffee campaign have alerted me to a
couple of interesting studies on the Oxfam America web site:
The Specialty Coffee Association of America SCAA sets the industry's standards
for growing, roasting and brewing. Members of the SCAA include coffee
retailers, roasters, producers, exporters and importers,
as well as manufacturers of coffee equipment and related products.
See the
coffee category
of DMOZ for more. I was once the editor!
Eat Up is a book about
unusual cuisines, written by a Canadian food scientists who travels the
world to study
the most unusual food and drink he can find. Civet coffee from
Indonesia certainly
earned his attention. Listen to
Professor Marcone's interview on the NPR program Fresh Air to learn, ahem, where
this coffee comes from.
Coffee Kids is an international,
non-profit organization established to improve the lives
of children and families who live in coffee-growing communities around
the
world.
As a geographer, I have become
increasingly convinced that learning about local music
is an almost essential part of learning about places. Two collections
from Putumayo -- one of my favorite labels -- are especially important
for learning about the places where coffee originates. They are simply
Music from the Coffeelands and
Music from the Coffeelands 2 . Each has an eclectic mix of
excellent music and coffee-rich liner notes.
Dr. Alex Goetz has reviewed "Coffee
Talk: Some Surprising Health Benefits," published by Real Age. Like
most of the other positive articles I have seen, the article suggests
advises moderation.
Dr. Taraneh Razavi offers
Coffee, Good for the Brain on her health blog. Some of the comments
mention the potential ill effects
as well. It was on Dr. Razavi's site that I found Oliver Ray's
exquisite
artwork.
My coffee
obsession began when I started to understand how the fair-trade
movement was helping to improve the lives of farm families who work
very hard to produce fine coffees and who
earn very
little for their efforts. I have been fortunate enough to take students
to the
coffeelands
of Nicaragua twice and will return in 2009. I have also now visited
coffeelands in Guatemala and will tour coffee production in Brazil
before the end of this year. The coffee
index page is now the gateway to all of my coffee endeavors.
