Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (42 page)

I had already turned to quit the shed, when a loud crackling arrested my attention. It sounded like a machine-gun. Were some rebels attacking the quemada? Oh, no, nothing of that sort. In one of the heaps of burning coffee, the beans were exploding. For a minute or two, sparks flew in every direction. They looked like fireflies, describing little parabolas athwart the greyish-black fumes. Soon it was all over, the last chemical revolt against destruction had been crushed. Now the beans had been reduced to charcoal; they had suffered the inevitable death whose germs slumber in all living creatures.

I took my departure. The street along which I walked ran between the high walls of gardens, walls overtopped by huge cactuses, by pines, and by eucalyptus trees. How cool the night was on this plateau. Where the coffee was burning, smoke had hidden the stars. Now they were sparkling abundantly in the clear sky. Yet not so abundantly as in our northern hemisphere; the fertility of the southern soil has not been communicated to the southern skies. I recognized some of the constellations: the Southern Cross, the Centaur, the Compasses.

Then, looking at the zenith, I descried the two dark areas that are known as the “coal-sacks.” These are like black pits in the firmament, pits where no star shines.

An Indian passed me. He was wearing blue overalls, open in front down to the navel. The man went by without a greeting. He was lean of visage, and walked stiffly, barefooted, so that his feet made no sound.

I turned to follow him with my eyes, as he glided towards the shed. Was he the night-watchman’s relief? His raiment and his bare feet suggested extreme poverty. Perhaps he hoped to steal some of the un-burned coffee?

No, that was unlikely. Coffee was too cheap in Brazil to be worth stealing. Everyone could get as much as he wanted for nothing. What did it matter to the poor of Brazil that the poor of Europe could not buy coffee because the price was kept up by these bonfires?

Most Brazilians shrug their shoulders when you speak to them of the quemada. All the same, they look at this coffee-burning askance, for simple folk are not pleased by the destruction of commodities produced by their comrades’ labour. The ill-feeling, however, does not take a violent form. I had been told that a very few policemen sufficed, in Santos, to guard the barges into which coffee is shovelled in order to be dumped out at sea.

“Nevertheless,” I said in conversation next day, “there must be persons who disapprove of these bonfires and of this dumping? I do not mean poor folk, who are comparatively indifferent to what happens. I am thinking of members of the intelligentzia, who cannot fail to regard the destruction of the coffee crop by governmental action as a grave economic problem.”

I was talking to Carlos Hennig, an elderly German merchant, who settled in Brazil forty years ago.

“Of course there are some such. For instance, the liberals, who are opposed on principle to state interference with the interplay of supply and demand. I may mention Alves de Lima. He is one of the wealthiest men in the country, belonging to the old Portuguese stock, and he has written a fierce invective against this form of state intervention.”

“Do you think I could have a talk with him?”

“He runs a newspaper in São Paulo. I will ring him up on the phone.”

In a few minutes Carlos Hennig came back to me. Alves de Lima was not in São Paulo. He had gone to his country house, which lay amid extensive coffee-plantations, not far from Campinas.

“Where is Campinas?” I asked, and was glad to learn from Hennig that I could get there without spending several days in an airplane. As distances go in Brazil, it was close at hand, only sixty-five miles northwest of São Paulo. I could reach it in an hour or two by rail.

Next day we took train across the “terra roxa.” The railway ran among dark-green plantations. The coffee-shrubs looked to me like dwarf trees rather than big bushes. With their abundant foliage they formed a huge green carpet stretching to the horizon. The whole countryside was a green garden. Where roads crossed the green, one saw the earth, chocolate-red, sometimes almost violet in tint. Dark-green and dark-red were the “national colours” of the coffee-state São Paulo.

We reached Campinas. It was a busy little town, surrounding a central square, known in Portuguese as the “Praça.” All these central squares are children of the Forum of ancient Rome. Pigeons were wheeling round the church, but in Brazil their iris pinions did not contrast with a Mediterranean sky. The birds disappeared beneath a pergola, under whose shelter three vigorous women were doing laundry-work in a stone basin. A couple of vultures lumbered across the marketplace. We were not in the Campagna, where civilization has prevailed for thousands of years, but in South America, subject to the unceasing menace of birds and beasts of prey.

Hiring a taxi in the square, we drove out through the plantations. The air was sultry-sweet, and the breeze that whistled past the windshield, rustling in the hood, was like the
Föhn
made odorous by jasmine and orange-blossom. The last building we passed as we left the outskirts of the town was the Botanical Institute, whose creation has been the life-work of an Austrian scientist named Dafert. It is one of the most important experimental stations for the study of sub-tropical agriculture.

Then, for a long time, there was nothing to be seen but coffee-trees. One forgot that they were trees. So bent and laden were they that they seemed, rather, an endless herd of cattle. We saw few men. They wore white shirts, wide open at the neck, and broad-brimmed straw hats. Their trousers were tucked into high boots.

“A defence against serpents,” explained Hennig. “Many thousands of Brazilians die every year of snake-bite; it is extremely dangerous to go barefoot in this country!”

At length we reached the lodge, a roughly built frame-house. When we had left the taxi, two slender half-breeds, wearing clean, white raiment, conducted us by garden-paths to the planter’s villa, a three-storied building. But for certain peculiarities of the colonial style of architecture, one might have thought it one of the fine country houses lying between Nice and Cannes.

The walls of the building were covered with a purple-flowering Bougainvillaea. Where barely half a century ago the primeval forest had stood intact, the power of money and of labour had charmed into existence a fragment of the Riviera.

Octaviano Alves de Lima was reclining in a long-chair on the veranda when we were announced. He knew what I had come to ask about, and sprang to his feet exclaiming: “There is no such thing as overproduction! O fantasma da superproducção não existe! Overproduction is a phantom of the imagination! The pundits at the Coffee Institute should read Henry George and learn that the Brazilian crisis is wholly due to protectionism. Free trade would instantly solve the coffee-problem!”

“Then you don’t think that there is too much coffee?” I asked, in astonishment.

The white-clad millionaire waved his hand in the negative.

“O café reclama expansão, exige novos mercados consumidores. Coffee needs expansion, and new markets for its consumption.”

I objected. “Surely the production of coffee needs to be restricted; at any rate until new coffee-consuming countries have been found.”

“Per a derrubada da barreira alfandegeria!” exclaimed Octaviano Alves de Lima. “By throwing down tariff barriers! Why do the Russians drink no coffee? Could they not buy millions of sacks from us? There is no over-production; it is tariffs that are the root of the mischief.”

“Do you want to go to war with Russia?” I inquired. “How are you going to compel the Russians to buy Brazilian coffee?”

“Easily enough,” answered Octaviano. “The Russians want to export their own produce. Brazil need merely enter into a satisfactory commercial treaty with the Soviet Union. We shall willingly pledge ourselves to take Russian grain, if they will take Brazilian coffee in exchange.”

“An excellent idea,” said Hennig. “You scratch my back, and I will scratch yours! But it won’t work so far as Russia is concerned.”

“Why not?” asked the fazendeiro.

“Because consumption does not depend exclusively upon tariffs and prices. The Russians have their own habits. How can you compel people who have been accustomed to tea for centuries to drink coffee instead? Even if you abolish tariff barriers, you will still have this obstacle in your path. It is much easier to make tea than to make coffee. You put your tea in a teapot and pour boiling water upon it, and there you are. Lots more than that to do before you can make drinkable coffee! No one knows it better than you. Coffee is not for Russian peasants or for Chinese coolies.”

Octaviano Alves de Lima made no answer. Our host and Hennig lighted cigarettes. A mulatto woman served us with coffee. After a while the fazendeiro ended the silence.

“All tariff barriers must be broken down,” he repeated obstinately. “Free trade must become worldwide. Immediately. Yes, immediately.”

That word “immediately” haunted me. I asked Senhor Alves de Lima how he thought free trade in coffee could be inaugurated “immediately.”

He looked at me in astonishment. Where was the difficulty?

“If prices were left uncontrolled, if they were to be determined by nothing but the haggling of the market, would they not fall so low that the majority of planters would be compelled to close down?”

“Of course! So much the better. Thus you would get restricted planting, which is universally regarded as a desideratum.”

“Then only those who could produce for a market in which knockdown prices prevailed would escape bankruptcy?”

Alves de Lima smiled.

“That is the fundamental law of economic life,” he said. “The fittest survive. Anyone whose production is too costly is forced out of the running.”

I suppressed the obvious retort that capital punishment was a rather harsh measure for producing at too high a cost. O fantasma da super-producçao não existe? Certainly, if only a few survivors were left upon the battlefield, over-production would come to an end. Still, so merciless a “Darwinism” was uncongenial to me.

“The fittest.” Who are the fittest? Octaviano was a Croesus. Perhaps he was one of the few planters who would have been able to survive the crash; to keep his head above the waters of insolvency until, through ruthlessly reduced production, his coffee would again become marketable at a paying price. But what about the millions who would be slaughtered on the economic battlefield? Was this a solution?

The tropic night fell swiftly. The orange-coloured sun had dipped below the horizon. We strolled through the garden, our nostrils assailed by sweet scents. Flowers fertilized by night-flying insects were pouring forth their perfume as a nightingale pours forth song.

Our host’s lovely garden was further beautified by the statues of Italian gods and goddesses. They were watching over a marble reservoir, filled with clear water.

Beside this reservoir we said farewell. In the quickly gathering darkness, Octaviano, wearing white drill, reminded me somehow of a Roman proconsul. His words had been reasonable enough, but the reasoning was that of an extremely rich man.

“Of course Octaviano is absolutely wrong,” said Carlos, when we had taken our seats in the train for the journey back from Campinas to São Paulo. The brightness of the starry heavens showed that we were on a lofty plateau. As the train gathered speed, the wind blew chill through the window. “Octaviano is mistaken when he believes that, as soon as the Brazilian government ceased to maintain prices, most of the planters would abandon their plantations.”

“Still,” I said, “if prices were to fall as they must, the planters could not go on paying wages to their workers.”

“All the same, very few of the fazendas would be abandoned. A man will stick to his land so long as he has a roof over his head, enough food to keep him from starving, and a little live-stock. Rather than quit his plantation, he would introduce a profit-sharing system.”

“Profit-sharing?”

“Certainly. If the Chinese tin barons were able to work with their coolies on a profit-sharing system, the Brazilian coffee barons could do the same. In times of crisis, they could pay a portion of the profits instead of paying straight wages. We must not underestimate a planter’s love for his land. The smaller the plantation, the greater the affection! The land has been secured at a heavy sacrifice. Will it be lightly forsaken?”

That seemed to me psychologically sound.

“Do you think,” I asked, “that the owners of comparatively small plantations would grow rice and other cereals, without allowing their coffee-trees to perish? That they would hold on to coffee in the hope that prices would rise some day?”

“I am sure of it.”

I was watching the coloured illuminated advertisements as we passed through the outskirts of São Paulo.

“There is another respect in which Alves de Lima misunderstands the situation. The advocate of free trade forgets that the Brazilian currency is bolstered up by the price of coffee. When the coffee-crash occurred in São Paulo, it coincided with the general crash in Wall Street. Because the international financiers were in it up to the neck, we could raise no more loans. The price of coffee having fallen too low, the balance of trade was against us. The milreis fell on the foreign exchanges, and we began to export our gold reserves. . . . No, it would be madness to let the price of coffee take its own course, as the freetraders demand. Brazilian exports would steadily diminish, and therewith our currency would be undermined. We must try and discover new forms for the state control of economic life. Only in that way can our country be saved from ruin.”

N
EXT
day, Hennig told me how the quemada system had been introduced. Like all cultured Brazilians, he hated the destruction of coffee in bonfires, and knew that it was preposterous. If any had a better plan to suggest, they must bring it before the Coffee Council.

As yet, however, nothing had been found to replace this detestable method.

I was tired and distrait. “A god is being burned,” I should have liked to say. “The god and sustainer of most of the Brazilians. Are you burning him because he has become too great? Are you burning him because he has deceived his votaries? Is not this pure mythology?” But I kept my thoughts to myself.