Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (40 page)

Then came the year 1920. Was God a Brazilian after all? In 1919, when the harvest had been so scanty, the coffee-shrubs were granted a rest, with the result that they now showed a fertility unexampled since 1906. Who was going to consume these mountains of coffee? The news from Europe was that of Job’s comforters. In 1920 the “victorious” Allies began to recognize that not Germany and Austria alone had lost the war, but that the supposed conquerors on the field of battle were nevertheless financially defeated. Europe’s indebtedness to America had a disastrous effect in the markets. No wholesalers were inclined to buy coffee, for the consumption of the masses in all European countries was greatly reduced.

Coffee-substitutes were still being used to a disquieting extent. Where the necessities of life are bought and sold there is no restriction upon distortion, so those who wished to depress prices told coffee home-truths which that commodity had not listened to for centuries. Throughout Germany it was bruited abroad that the Black Apollo was an assassin, and that a beverage prepared from malt or from figs was wholesomer as well as cheaper.

Great was the disturbance in coffee-consuming countries, with a consequent fall in prices. Once more the Brazilian government had to come to the help of the planters. This time a miracle contributed to their salvation. The miracle was wrought by the Big Brother in the North, the only country where money was not tight. Prohibition was inaugurated in the United States by the eighteenth amendment to the constitution. Coffee rushed into the field that alcohol had been compelled to evacuate.

The long-lasting and fierce campaign in the American Union against the evils of alcoholism at length proved victorious. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, by making common cause with the churches, had secured the governmental suppression of all beverages containing over one-half of one per cent of alcohol. The cult of Bacchus in North America was not of ancient date, but was vigorous. Whereas in Europe grapes will not ripen north of the fiftieth parallel of latitude, in America the limit is as low as the forty-fifth parallel, on the east coast it is even lower, and the Virginia Company, which in 1620 made the first experiments in vine-growing, had no success. Then, in 1769, French Canadians, driven south, tried their hand in Illinois, which is crossed by the fortieth parallel; but there, likewise, failure resulted. Not until the year 1820 did an army officer named Adlun succeed in growing satisfactory vines on a large scale. From this date, the Americans began to drink home-grown wines, and of these for decades the Isabella wine of Ohio was the best known. Today there is a good deal of viticulture in the United States, especially in California, New Mexico, and Arizona. (Of course vine-growing was interrupted during the prohibition years.) Nevertheless, down to the passing of the eighteenth amendment, and after it illicitly, the import of Rhenish wines, claret, and champagne continued.

The American temperance movement was directed, not so much against wine as against beer and spirits. Neither Bacchus nor Gambrinus could withstand its onslaught. There existed a number of “dry” states before 1920, but in that year the whole of the Union went dry. In name, at least, for illicit drinking was widespread until, in December 1932, the ranks of the prohibitionists were broken when Congress authorized the consumption of beer with an alcoholic content of 3.2 per cent.

Besides the illicit traders, the “bootleggers,” who, like their prototypes in history, made their profit out of defeating the aims of the puritans (since human nature is such that people will spare neither trouble nor expense in the endeavour to secure forbidden fruit), the coffee-barons reaped the advantages of prohibition. Smuggled liquor was expensive, and the synthetic product often dangerous; so during the prohibition years, coffee became the chief beverage in the United States. In the gigantic manufacturing enterprises of New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and elsewhere, it had long been prized as an accelerator, as a potion that could enhance muscular and nervous energy, and therefore increase output. But now, when the eighteenth amendment was in force, the population drank more and more, coffee because they liked it, and not simply because they found it useful. True, coffee did not, in the American Union, give a peculiar stamp to the civilization of the country, did not fertilize intellectual life as it had done in Venice, in Paris, and in Vienna. The fundamental characteristics of Americans forbade this effect. Even while drinking coffee for pleasure, they did not forget, in the unconscious at least, that the main use of the beverage was to promote energy.

But it is time to return to the effect of the eighteenth amendment upon Brazil. Promptly the United States became the chief recipient of the most important Brazilian export.

Whereas in 1913 the United States imported, in round figures, six and a half million sacks of coffee, ten years later the amount rose to nearly eleven millions. This signified a great relief to a vastly overburdened Brazil.

But what was the nature of that burden? Merely overproduction of coffee? No; it was, rather, the mentality of the planters; their selfish misunderstanding, their cupidity. Instead of being grateful to the state authorities, who, again and again, had saved them by valorization purchases, they repeatedly broke their word.

Obviously, in valorization, the state took all the risks. If the valorization system had gone bankrupt, the State would have gone bankrupt as well. For making this immense sacrifice, this unprecedented venture, the state asked the planters to pledge themselves, in return, not to extend their plantations. But the coffee-barons did not keep the pledge. They were getting good prices for their produce; what did it matter to them whether it was from the state or from private merchants in their own or in foreign lands? Without restriction, therefore, they continued to play a game of roulette with the soil. They ignored the prohibition against extended planting, and in an unintegrated country sixteen times as large as France control was impossible. Besides, in many cases, without actually breaking new ground, they weeded, manured, and pruned their coffee-bushes more carefully than before, thus multiplying the output.

When, in 1924, there was a disastrously large harvest, and the clamour for governmental intervention was renewed, the state, warned by experience, modified its economic policy. Finding that its partners, the coffee-barons, were unteachable, it refused to go on carrying the burden alone. It conceived the excellent idea of transferring the risk to the shoulders of the producers. Instead of buying the crops, it prescribed the quantity of coffee that might be daily transported to the coast. Only a definite number of sacks were to be sent from the interior to the ports. The Instituto do Café, which had developed out of the Sociedad Promotura da Defesa do Café, became the new central authority of Brazilian economic policy. Its dictatorship, called for short the “Defesa,” was wielded from the Rua Wenceslau Braz in São Paulo, and acquired worldwide importance.

In the economic life of the globe, “Rua Wenceslau Braz” became a name of power like “Quai d’Orsay” or “Downing Street” in world politics.

Valorization had always been instituted when a crisis was threatening or had already arrived. The aim of the Defesa was to prevent crises.

In the interior of the country, the Defesa established warehouses, known as “reguladores,” in which the planters were obliged to store their coffee. According to the date of storage and the condition of the market, the Defesa allowed the delivery of coffee to a port of shipment. Thus supplies were kept equable throughout the year, and a crash in prices was prevented. As the most important feature of the system, the Defesa maintained strict secrecy concerning the number of sacks of coffee that were stored at a given time in the reguladores, the divulging of information about this matter being severely punished. No one could learn the amount of the Brazilian harvest; and, in course of time, speculators in Havre, London, Hamburg, and New York lost all inclination for gambling in a staple that could no longer offer surprises. The Defesa controlled the coffee-market of the world.

But the maintenance of this dictatorship was too costly. Although the Defesa did not, as the government had done, buy the crops, it had to make advances to the coffee-barons on the security of what they put in storage. Furthermore, it had to pay the salaries of its own officials, its countless watchmen and spies. Dictatorships are always costly.

Brazil was still abundantly supplied with capital from the financial world in general. The valorization of coffee had proved a great success. The state, acting as intermediary, sold its coffee at much higher prices than it had previously paid the planters. International financiers felt they had good reason for continuing to support “so well-advised a state.” Above all they had to bear in mind that stored coffee was the security for their loans. If they called in their advances, thus forcing down the price of coffee, they would undermine the value of this security. In a word, to quote an old saying, they had to throw good money after bad.

Such was the mechanism, both financial and psychological, which for nearly five years made the Defesa invulnerable. It became a state within the state. People bowed before its executive authority; it was a department with ministerial powers, against which there was no appeal. Mario Tavares, A. B. de Salles, and other officials of São Paulo, held sway by turn in the Defesa.

The dagger-thrust was delivered at a weak spot in the armour. A planned economy—to say nothing of “State socialism”—was impossible, in the long run, where capitalism and anarchism were so closely linked. The character of the Brazilian planters recalls the peculiarities of a high explosive, combining as it does the unstable charm of the Portuguese and the hardness of the Indian aborigines, whose favourite word, “ita,” stone, is found in so many place-names of Brazil. A Brazilian will make sacrifices for the common welfare in the showy form of war and of death upon the battlefield. But it is harder to live for the fatherland than to die for it, and hard to make sacrifices under stress of reasonable considerations!

The Achilles’ heel of the Defesa was that it was not able to cope with the anarchy of production. It merely supervised distribution. Dictatorship notwithstanding, it could not enforce its veto upon expanded planting. As soon as the planters realized that the Defesa was maintaining prices, they perceived that extended plantations were more lucrative than gold-digging. Even more serious was the fact that, trade being good, the number of planters steadily increased. The result was something that resembled the “tulip mania” in seventeenth-century Holland. Just as in those days all the Dutch, with a blind faith that the luxury price of tulips would be maintained, set to work cultivating these flowers, so now did every Brazilian, be he small shopkeeper, host of a tavern, apothecary, or sailor, take to coffee-planting—if no more than indirectly and as a means of investment for his savings. The result was that, while quantity increased, quality fell off. Coffee-planting is a fine art, and needs expert training. The influx of amateurs into the occupation, the growth of “private coffee-planting,” led to so great a deterioration of the product that many consumers began to demand other coffee than Brazilian. They had been noticing for some time that Brazilian coffee was becoming acrid. It was lacking in aroma. Simultaneously there had been an increase in Central American production, stimulated by the measures of the Defesa though the administrators of that organization had had no such object in view. What Brazil had been doing for herself at a considerable financial sacrifice was a great advantage to Brazil’s competitors in Central America.

While the “mild” coffees from Colombia, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica were comparatively easy to sell, in the interior of Brazil the quantities of “sharp” Brazilian coffee accumulating in the reguladores of the Defesa became so enormous that the time arrived when the fruits of anarchic over-production could no longer be marketed at any price.

In October 1929, Brazil’s black day dawned. The Defesa collapsed. Thereupon the price of coffee, which had been artificially maintained for a quarter of a century, crashed.

The centre of Brazilian economic life, the Defesa do Café, had been destroyed. The planters had anarchically undermined their own buttresses.

To save itself, the state now had recourse to equally anarchic measures.

Breathless with astonishment and horror, the world watched the third phase of the Brazilian coffee-war.

The first phase began in 1906, when the state bought the crop in order to speculate with coffee for the advantage of the producers.

The second phase began eighteen years later, in 1924, when the state ceased to buy the crop, but advanced money on it, and regulated export.

Now, in 1931, the state began to destroy coffee.

D
ON’T
you smell something?” asked the pilot.

The windows of the fuselage were open. The pilot, entrusting the control to his mechanic, had left his seat to come in to speak to me. He closed the door behind him. Although we were not flying swiftly, this needed a good deal of exertion. The air was pressing heavily against the front of the machine.

“Can’t you smell anything?” he repeated.

“No, I smell nothing,” I replied.

“This is the place where it begins,” he said, snuffing the breeze. “Last week, it began here.”

“How high are we?” I inquired.

“Three thousand feet.”

“What can one smell at such an altitude?”

I looked out of the window. During the last ten minutes, there had been a change in the landscape. The green coastline over which we were flying from north to south had become invisible. The breaking of the Atlantic rollers on the shore could no longer be seen. Vanished, too, the salmon-coloured rocks that showed from time to time above the green fringe, and around which the white sea-foam had been especially conspicuous.

We were passing over a stratum of clouds that looked like cottonwool. Since we were not very high, the clouds must be close to the ground.