Not my cup of tea

I’m a coffee drinker, you see. Black, two sugars. I have been for a long, long time, and had my most intense cup of coffee back in 2001.

The beans were grown, picked, dried and roasted within 100 metres of where I drank the coffee, in a small house on the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro. I had gone out to volunteer for a small Tanzanian NGO, a wide-eyed soft-palmed child of south county Dublin, naive to the ways of the world. And when I asked for coffee, someone came with a sandcastle bucket full of beans and boiled some grounds in a pot. I didn’t sleep for 36 hours.

But the intensity wasn’t just in the heavy shot of caffeine or the syrupy black aroma, it was in the back story.

In that village of Kilema, near Moshi, I met a man called Henry. Henry was in his seventies, a well-spoken Tanzanian man from the Chagga tribe, who had returned to Kilema after a working life in Dar Es Salaam. Henry had worked in the ministry of finance in Tanzania, and had a greater grasp on macroeconomics, or any economics, for that matter, than I did. I had just finished three displeasing years of law and had escaped my life in Ireland for a jaunt in Tanzania.

As we drank coffee that would blind a heavyweight wrestler, Henry told me about his farm. It was meant to be his pension, a small holding of a few acres on which he grew coffee, the local cash crop . Only the cash crop wasn’t bringing in what it used to. In fact, Henry had reverted to barter, subsistence farming. Coffee yields were down. In their heyday, the fields were producing twice what they now gave up each harvest. From the days of more, more, more, when farmers were encouraged to use poisonous amounts of fertiliser to sate western demand for dark little beans, things had changed. Back then, demand for coffee was high, but supply was lower than it now is. Vietnam had yet to get into the coffee-growing game, and Brazil was producing only a fraction of  what it now puts out. Prices were high.

And organic farming had yet to make an impact. So the chemicals were poured on, stripping the land of its innate fertility to produce more yields, more often. Biodiversity suffered, snakes near disappeared, but no matter. They were churning out the arabica beans to beat the band, and the money was rolling in.

But then Vietnam started doing the same, and the price of a bag of coffee dropped by half. And then we westerners said ‘we want organic’ which meant that fertiliser had to go.

Crops dropped by a quarter as the bleached soil took time to recover from years strung out on heavy chemicals.

Acre for acre, the land was now producing one dollar for every eight it had coughed up at the peak. And Henry, God love him, had retired to meet with a coffee-growing recession, and found himself selling bananas to neighbours to stay alive.

Clichéd as it may seem, I think of Henry’s story nearly every time I buy a bag of coffee. And in a month’s time, I’ll be back on Kilimanjaro again, among the coffee trees, to see how things have changed. Or if they’ve changed at all.