Urbanite Studies Agriculture…the story continues

I find myself in a strange situation. I’m an urbanite with resolutely ungreen and unexperienced hands. To prove it: Spring onions – spring onions, I say! – died on me this winter. For three weeks this August, I find myself trying to understand how people grow coffee and the challenges that they might be facing from climate change. What’s more, I find myself pretending to be an expert not only in agriculture, but also speaking about it in a language I only started learning over a week ago. The people at or connected with INCAPER whom I’ve met and am working with here are experts be it in their study or their work.

It’s hard to imagine how people actually grow crops unless you actually go and see for yourself. Farmers here in Brasil don’t necessarily focus on coffee, just like what I saw in Vietnam. On Friday I had the opportunity to interview a guy whose main crop was coconut, and another, papaya. Both grow coffee beneath the shade of coconut/papaya – they commented that they appreciated the security and convenience of that particular pairing. Their largest concern, they said, was productivity and cost. This seems to be the largest concern, especially for small-scale, family agricultores – staff at INCAPER agreed as well. These growers have ten, twenty-five, forty, hectares of a variety of crop. This is considered production on a small scale, thus they don’t necessarily grow enough to guarantee a fixed price on the very volatile market. In the following week

Alongside this issue of livelihood security sits the issue of conservation of endangered habitat. Coffee over this region is grown over cleared Atlantic rainforest, known as the Mata Atlântica here in Brazil. The Mata Atlântica, like the Amazon, is a biodiverse biome that crosses national borders. It extended historically from the south-eastern region of Brazil down to Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina, and is known for its primate species, a majority of which are endemic and endangered. As is common among areas of rich biological diversity, Mata Atlântica has disappeared much faster than its interior neighbor, the Amazon – its nutrient rich soils are sought after to grow coffee, mamão (general term for papaya), cattle, Piper nigrum and others.

It was interesting to be able to see, in person, the matrix of critically endangered biome interspersed among swaths of monocultures and polycultures here in Linhares, which is home to the Federal Reserve of Sooretama, one of the remaining protected areas of Atlantic Rainforest.

Brazil has been incredibly focused and successful in technological research and importantly, the transfer of these technologies to farmers towards the aim of productivity. Two species of coffee grown in Brazil are arabica and robusta, the latter known locally as conilon. Brazil produces way more arabica than conilon – a quarter of the coffee grown in Brazil in 2015 was conilon, a quarter which is in the state of EspÍrito Santo. In this state just 60% of coffee is conilon, but that alone gives it the title of second-largest producer of coffee, one step behind all of Vietnam, a country more than 7 times larger in size. So if everything goes according to plan I’ll be able to meet more cool people on my side of the world who’re doing cool things and draw some pretty interesting cross-comparisons.

Checking out.

Day 7# Sooretama, Espírito Santo

A forest giant Jequitibá of the immensely biodiverse Mata Atlântica, the Atlantic Coastal Rainforest. As a remnant of the deforestation that occurred here not too long ago, the Jequitibá stands starkly out in a glossy-leaved sea of green, a monoculture lavoura of Conilon coffee, A secondary forest fragment owned by multi-national mining company Vale do Rio Doce in the background.

Since I arrived in Espírito Santo I’ve been warmly received by researchers at INCAPER. I flew into Vítoria, the state capital where their headquarters is located, on Wednesday and was greeted by Eduardo Sales, an extensionist who has been working with INCAPER for nearly 30 years.

INCAPER stands for Instituto Capixaba de Pesquisa, Assistência Técnica e Extensão Rural. If I could provide a rough translation, it would be the Espírito Santo Institute of Research, Technical Assistance and Rural Extension, linked up with the State Secretary of Agriculture. ‘Capixaba’ refers to a native of Espírito Santo, with the ‘xa’ bit pronounced like a ‘sha’.

Last semester, in the middle of thesis research grant applications, I connected with him after finding his study co-published with a researcher at the University of Vermont. A couple of months later, here I am. Him and Marcia, another researcher with INCAPER, are hosting me very generously in their wonderful house.

On arrival in Vítoria, I went to the office of INCAPER, where I was introduced to everyone by Eduardo and granted interviews with Romário and Maria Ferrão (they happened to be siblings). They both spoke for the effort that the agency was doing to develop, through breeding – they heavily emphasized that it was NOT genetic modification – varieties of Coffea canephora. These varieties would be more resistant to pests and temperature extremes. I was also presented by Romário with a book of  with a book of 25 chapters and 700 pages. This book, of which Romário and Maria were editors, contains a treasure trove of information about cafe Conilón including its natural and commercial history and current efforts to propagate it.

The next two days were spent making visits to coffee farms in the neighboring municipality of Sooretama to see different farm systems and talk to farmers about climate change. I had the opportunity to be in the company of agronomists, extensionists and forest engineers, who know the area very well and were incredibly generous in their advise and help with translation as I made recordings. It’s now the weekend, time to gather my thoughts and get ready to go into the field pronto!

Checking out. Yours truly, Ruici.

Day 3, São Paulo: Interview 1# with Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza

This afternoon I am heading to the Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza Studio in the city of São Paulo, where I’ll interview Felipe Croce. Just a quick overview of FAF: it’s an organic Arabica coffee farm in the state that’s known as Brazil’s financial capital. Felipe is the son of the founders, Silvia and Marcos. From what I read on their website, he worked in a U.S. specialty coffee roasters until about 6 years ago, when he moved back to São Paulo to join his family business.

Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza: advocating sustainable organic and non-organic coffee farming (img from http://www.fafbrazil.com)

I first heard about FAF first from a quick google of coffee farms in Brazil. At first, since I’m focusing mainly on robusta coffee (Conilon/Coffea canephora), this specialty coffee collective didn’t seem to fit the project criterion… but then the thought to contact them became real when I made a connection with Singaporean specialty coffee roaster and café, Nylon coffee.

Nylon’s cupping sesh (img from nyloncoffee.sg)

Nylon’s motto is this: “Inspired by the stories of each coffee, we travel far and wide to coffee producing countries to find the best coffees possible.” Jia Min from Nylon coffee told me in an email that they’ve been buying various arabicas directly from FAF partner farms for 3 years now, and made their first trip to Brazil in 2014. In fact, Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza was the very first farm Nylon bought arabica from directly since the Singaporean roasters began in 2012. Pretty cool, huh.

So I sent Felipe an email a month ago. In a couple of hours, I’ll hop on a bus to their FAF Studio on the corner of Praça Horácio Sabino this afternoon, to meet him for a presentation about their sustainable agriculture ethos. It’ll be interesting to learn about the specialty coffee strategy and even ask Felipe’s thoughts on robusta – since you can’t learn about either coffee in isolation. Exciting stuff!

—

To new readers: I’m Ruici, a fourth year undergraduate of Environmental Science and Policy (A.B.) at Duke University. I’m from the island-city of Singapore! The main focus of my project is on the capacity of small-scale robusta coffee farmers to adapt to local changes in climate. It’s a project about sustainable agriculture that faces climate change head on, from the ground up. I’m learning about the most valuable tropical agricultural commodity in the world’s largest caffeinators, Brazil and Vietnam, thanks to a collection of grants from my university. Not just any coffee, though! Robusta coffee, the underdog sibling of the doubly priced arabica. In other words, it’s a project about chasing the roots of what we eat and drink in a world of a inevitably changing climate.

Pictures are not mine unless stated so.

Before the Robusta Bean

(Part 1, Daklak province in Vietnam)

Agroforestry in a robusta field: Avocado to the top left, coffee to the bottom left, columns of black pepper and durian in the distance.

Before the robusta coffee bean, before your instant nescafe coffee. Behold, the cherry-laden branches of a coffee tree! 

In the month of May, I went to Daklak province in Vietnam’s Central Highland region, an 8 hour sleeper bus-ride from the city of Saigo. I hung out with my college friend Quang and his wonderful family, who grow coffee among other things. It marked a change in how I had been working on my thesis on robusta coffee – a change from thinking and reading to talking to people who grow this stuff for real. I was lucky to be invited to his aunt and uncle’s 1 ha field, where they and their son work when they’re not working on their rice field. With Quang as an excellent interpreter, they told me about all plants they grew around and beneath the coffee (pictured somewhat in the shade of an avocado tree). It was the wet season and the coffee berries were green and not yet ready for harvesting.

Heading into Quang’s family’s coffee field on motorbike (thanks Quang) 😀

The very elegant black pepper before the peppercorn! In fact more elegant-looking than coffee trees, and coffee trees are pretty awesome-looking.

The certainly good-looking leaves of the black pepper climber. 

Black pepper (Piper nigrum) was the other main crop that was grown, the climber curving and growing very elegantly around a variety of taller trees. In the picture to the right, the pepper grows around what they called cây muồng – which had odd pinnate leaves and was perhaps a member of the Fabaceae family. His uncle added that the cây muồng yielded good quality timber, useful for building and construction. Pepper also was grown around avocado (Persea americana) and durian (Durio sp.) trees. They commented that sometimes they had to destroy the durians because people would climb the trees to steal the fruit, in the process destroy the more valuable pepper.

A little black pepper climber beginning its ascent around an avocado tree.

I asked whether they thought that the shade from the taller trees mentioned above would obstruct the growth of the coffee. After some discussion, they decided that there was a trade-off. The little canopy did block sunlight and rain from reaching the coffee, but at the same time prevented evaporation of water from the soil, which had become a recent concern. The day we visited, they were busying themselves trimming branches in preparation for the monsoon’s coming, their hard work revealed by piles of branches and leaves along the path.

Other plants were pointed out to me were subsistence crop including: potatoes (that were also sold in the market), an oblong furry gourd that resembled winter melon (cucumber/pumpkin/watermelon family, Cucurbitaceae), tea. In total, they grew 5 different crop apart from the coffee. With such diversity in the farm there is always something to do in the field, they said.

Watch this space for more updates about anything and everything coffee. In Part 2, I’ll write about my 3-week trip to Brazil that’s coming this August. There, I’ll learn about how farmers in Espirito Santo grow robusta coffee.

Coffee & Climate Change: Brazil & Vietnam

After nearly 4 months of hiatus, Before The Bean is reviving itself.

I managed to get some grants from my university to do my thesis research on robusta coffee, a comparative study between Brazil & Vietnam, the world’s coffee giants. After a lot of communication and discussion with established researchers working on coffee, I’ve decided to venture into the field of qualitative research. If all the paperwork and permissions works out, I’m going to find out how folks who grow coffee are prepared for climate change, be it in terms of coffee crop resilience, alternative crops and alternative livelihoods. This will be a year-long project for my senior thesis, aiming for Graduation with Distinction in the Environmental Science & Policy.

Watch this space for more research updates!

– R

A cup of history

That cup of coffee you sip at your breakfast table, desk, or café comes from far away. It was grown in Brazil, Colombia, Vietnam, the Ivory Coast, or one of a hundred over coffee-producing lands on five continents. It is a palpable and long-standing manifestation of globalization.

For 500 years coffee has been grown in tropical countries for consumption in temperate regions, linking peoples of different lands and continents by trade, investment, immigration, conquest, and cultural and religious diffusion.

There is a world history in your cup.

The Global Coffee Economy: Coffee and Global Development, Introduction. Topik and Clarence-Smith (2003), pg 1

Frank Sinatra’s Coffee Song

Way down among in Brazilians
Coffee beans grow by the zillions
So they’ve got to find those extra cups to fill
They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil

You can’t get cherry soda
’cause they’ve got to fill that quota
And the way things are I’ll bet they never will
They’ve got a zillion tons of coffee in Brazil

No tea or tomato juice
You’ll see no potato juice
’cause the planters down in Santos all say No, No, No

The politician’s daughter
Was accused of drinkin’ water
And was fined a great big fifty dollar bill
They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil

You date a girl and find out later
She smells just like a percolator
Her perfume was made right on the grill
Why, they could percolate the ocean in Brazil

And when their ham and eggs need savor
Coffee ketchup gives ’em flavor
Coffee pickles way outsell the dill
Why, they put coffee in the coffee in Brazil

So you’ll add to the local color
Serving coffee with a cruller
Dunkin’ doesn’t take a lot of skill
They’ve got an awful lot of coffee
An awful lot of coffee
Man, they got a gang of coffee in Brazil!

—

This song was written by Bob Hilliard and Dick Miles, and recorded by Sinatra in 1946. On Wikipedia, it’s written that this song is a US caricature of the Paulista coffee producing industry of that time, and I think that’s a great expression for this lighthearted, whimsical and hyperbolic take on the production reality of this global commodity. Brazil’s domination of the coffee market with the Paulista planters of São Paulo – the Santos planters that Sinatra sings of – during the Old Republic 1850 – 1920. Coffee export domination of arabica market continued through the Vargas administration (1930 – 1945), the military dictatorship; this immense presence of Brazil in the general coffee market course continues today. The lyrics that Sinatra sings reflect US criticism of the heavy-handed state management of coffee production of that time, which allowed the country to build up immense surpluses of green coffee and in effect control coffee prices and It also shows the context in which the International Coffee Agreement was drawn up in attempt to regulate the coffee market.

That was a little watered down shot of history in this song sung by an iconic jazz singer. For those people in the US, I hope you guys have a great holiday in Thanksgiving! If you haven’t already and feel like it, have a nice cup of coffee, tea, water, juice or whatever it is that floats your boat.

State of Brazilian Coffee

Minas Gerais, which produces both robusta and arabica coffee, emerges as the clear source of most of Brazilian coffee.

Where is most of the coffee in Brazil coming from? Brazil is huge and incredibly diverse; though is the largest producer of arabica coffee and the bulk of coffee in general, it may surprise you to know that a single state in Brazil overwhelmingly dominates arabica production. Indeed, this state is the single largest producer of arabica coffee in the world. Here is a preliminary screenshot of a visualization I’m working on on Tableau, which will be interactive and show which state produces which species coffee. I use data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.

Coffee Diaspora

The coffees emerged from the African continent – Ethiopia and Republic of Congo (then a Belgian colony) – way back, borne on the waves of trade and commerce, and of course an addiction for the magic brew which gave clarity of thought. The ‘original’ arabica coffee, as one may call it, emerged from Ethiopia during what some think was the 6th century, and went to Yemen to be cultivated for export and to a lesser extent, local consumption. In the 1500-1600s coffee was exported up from Yemen to Turkey, from where coffee fever took hold of Western and Northern Europe (the average Fin consumes 12kg of coffee per year; the most coffee per capita in the world). From there, coffee was brought to the United States; at the same time, it is thought that arabica was smuggled to India.

A route through which Latin America received arabica was through the Caribbean. Seeds had been brought to Martinique, an island in the Lesser Antilles volcanic island chain, from Paris by French colonizers, where it was cultivated using slave labor in the 1700s. From Martinique, Coffea arabica was brought to the Dominican Republic, Haiti, México, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guyana and today’s coffee giants of the Americas, Brazil and Colombia. Brazil also received the bourbon variety of arabica from the French, which brought it from plantations in Reunión – also maintained with indentured and slave labor up to the abolishment.

The route that robusta (C. canephora) took from its native Republic of Congo in the late 1800s and 1900s is a little less well known. This may be because robusta coffee is much less valued on the higher-value specialty coffee market for its bitter, astringent taste; instead it is used in instant coffees which cater to an entirely different market. Many coffee retailers advertise that their beans are 100% arabica for that added sense of luxury and promise of a better taste. Although that is not to say that robusta doesn’t sell outside of instant coffee – it is added to arabica in certain coffee brands for that oomph, that extra kick of caffeine and the presentation of the espresso shot.

The Caffeinators of the World

The 4 coffee-exporting giants are Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia and only very recently Vietnam. We owe a lot to these countries whether we drink Starbucks, instant Nestle coffee, or connoisseur specialty coffees. Brazil has remained unbeaten as the top producer of all sorts of coffee since the late 19th century, when more than half of the world’s coffee was produced by Brazil in the coffee-producing states of São Paulo, Rio de Janerio, Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo. Today, Brazil produces about 30% of all coffees, exporting a 30 or so million 60 kg bags. Though coffee was grown by small producers in Vietnam since it was brought into the country by the French, the Đổi Mới policy in 1986 saw the rapid increase in agricultural industrialization. A considerable amount of capital and land was acquired and channeled into the production of coffee in particular.

The seemingly household and commonplace term coffee is deceiving and does not speak of the sheer variety of coffee products that exist. While it only refers to seeds or the cherries of the coffee plant, it covers a number of stages of processing: unhusked, unroasted (a.k.a green), or roasted. It may also refer to coffee in any form: instant, de-caffeinated, ground, or liquid coffee. Furthermore, it may refer to either arabica or robusta coffee, arabica being of higher-value than the harsher-tasting robusta. While Brazil is the largest producer of coffee in general, it specializes in arabica production and produces relatively smaller quantities of robusta. Vietnam on the other hand is the world’s largest producer of robusta.

This visual was created using Tableau and data from the International Coffee Organization.