Coffee and Slavery: A History of Exploitation | Drinklings
There is a tragic historical irony in the fact that as coffee emerged from the continent of Africa and underlay the development of the West, so also did much of the labor source that made coffee happen. Indeed, just as coffee reached Europe in the 17th century, so did an increase in Europe’s mindset towards a model of systematized forced labor.
Coffee was not the first crop to be harvested by exploitative labor. In Brazil, for example, the Portuguese used slaves to grow and harvest sugar. Slaves harvesting this crop lived an average of seven years (Pendergrast, 22), but the property owners found it easier (and cheaper) to import new slaves than improve worker conditions. In 1727, coffee was planted in Brazil and by the early 1800s it replaced sugar and even gold as the primary source of economic value. “Coffee made modern Brazil, but at an enormous human and environmental cost,” coffee historian Mark Pendergrast remarked. Indeed, Brazil imported approximately 40% of the twelve million enslaved Africans brought to the Americas by Western European countries. One German immigrant to Brazil went so far as to note, “In this country, the Blacks occupy the main role. They are responsible for all the labor and produce all the wealth in this land. The white Brazilian just doesn’t work.” Indeed, noted in Pendergrasts’ monograph, one member of the Brazilian Parliment went so far as to say, “Brazil is coffee and coffee is the negro.”
The story of slavery’s tie with coffee existed in other places. For example, the French colony of San Domingo (what would become Haiti) produced half of the world’s coffee by 1788. After the Haitian Revolution in 1791 cast aside its colonial French rulers, Haitian coffee would rot on trees such that today its global position in the coffee trade is negligible and Haiti still lives in both economic and agricultural social destitution. “Damn the coffee, damn the colonies” Napoleon said. Likewise, Jamaica’s plantation economy of 1832 enslaved approximately 45,000 people in the coffee trade, only second to the drink’s sweet additive. Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guadeloupe, Venezuela, Guatemala, and just about coffee producing region during the 1700s through mid-1800s relied on slavery in some measure to cultivate the coffee crop.
Brazil eventually abolished slavery in the late 19th century, replacing slavery with other forms of serfdom (debt bondage, for example). Other countries did the same. These systems were not the same as slavery, but they were still systems of economic coercion and provided numerous avenues for the advancement of human injustice.
The legacy of coffee as a product of forced labor remains in two major directions. First, its expansion made the modern world what it is today. In 1800, Brazil recorded less than two thousand pounds of coffee (for reference, that is roughly a pallet and a half). By the end of that century, it was exporting over a billion pounds every year. Coffee, and the slave labor that expanded it from a religious monastic beverage to one of the globe’s most lucrative products, made the world we live in. Recall that the Enlightenment was fueled by it, colonies boomed because of it. Even the identity of the United States as a coffee consuming country which dumps its tea harbors could only become such due to the human cost.
Between 1772 and 1799, U.S. coffee consumption grew seven times over. The tragic irony is that the drink of freedom that symbolized liberty over oppression and tyranny could only become that via the cost of freedom for others. Like many global products and industries, both their prevalence and innocence is predicated by centuries of suffering and human exploitation that downstream are forgotten and clouded over. Where does coffee come from? The easy answer is “the coffee tree.” But history would adjudicate this as simplistic. Coffee comes from the suffering of millions.
The second direction by which we see coffee’s forced labor origins is in the contemporary economic environments that still propel its industry standards and volume. Oppression dies slowly. Poverty dies slower still. Over 50% of modern coffee farmers (and their families) live in poverty. And at least 25% live in what is considered extreme poverty and we all know how poverty is linked with other forms of injustice: malnutrition, abuse, human trafficking, disease, corruption. It would be an absolute miracle if the crop grown on the backs of forced and coerced labor was somehow today immune from the downstream effects of its origins. It isn't. And that means, more than anything, that we must support initiatives that aim to alleviate injustice in the world of coffee.
