While I was researching the Commission for Environmental Cooperation last night, I ran across this article in a 2001 newsletter of theirs.
It really makes me wish that I drank coffee. Hell, I may buy some anyway - just on principle. I don't know a lot about what makes coffee taste good, but I do know what some of the areas (like Kona, HI) look like, and I've been in the rainforest in the Blue Mountain area of Jamaica. I'm guessing that constant shade and constant fog doesn't hurt much in the flavor development process. The Blue Mountains of Jamaica and our Smokey Mountains both derive their names from the constant mist that drapes the surface of the range.
There is a link at the end of the article that provides a much better way to help than our usual knee-jerk reflex to boycott and destroy what meager income that the grower relies on now. It provides a direct shortcut around the coyotes, and into the bean growers pocket. For you 'Zonies, coyotes at the southern Mexican border are more or less the same exploiters of the poor as ours in the north - except that they are loan sharks / bean buyers instead of undocumented alien transporters. For you easterners, you should know that coyotes rarely use Acme rocket skates, and never fall for that tunnel painted on the wall trick.
If it helps you to sleep at night (especially after drinking all of that caffeine), this is one industry steeped in international environmental and human rights injustices where the US consumer doesn't have to shoulder most of the blame. With a Starbucks on every corner, we are primarily consumers of beans from major plantations - you really don't need great coffee if you are going to disguise it with sugar and caramel and vanilla extract and scalded milk. For plantations serving the US market, Juan Valdez was replaced by John Deere decades ago - Juan just looked better to us in the TV ads. We don't have near the culture of coffee snobs (er, rather, gourmets) that we think that we do; certainly nowhere near that of other countries. For instance, fully 90% of Jamaica's Blue Mountain coffee is currently being exported to Japan, and I'm guessing that they don't think much about the fate of the poor peasant that cultivated and picked those beans. Ads in Japan probably feature a Japanese man in a shiny suit polishing his new Nissan bean harvesting machine.
On first pass, it may seem ironic that human rights issues destroyed many of these markets. Coffee production flourished in Jamaica until their emancipation in the mid 19th century. The British could no longer compete with slave-holding countries like Brazil and Cuba, and Jamaicans went from slavery to freedom, abject poverty, and empty stomachs. And lest you think that the UK was some sort of leader in human rights for granting emancipation without a single shot fired in anger, recall that we were at the hinge-point between the first and second industrial revolutions. Sure, we had a steam engine that made lots of smoke, a really cool chugging sound, and could get a wheel spinning really fast. We just hadn't quite put that wheel on the ground yet. We powered a few factories and stationary machine tools with steam, but the steam locomotive, steamships, electrical power generation, and the internal combustion engine were yet to be realized. In other words, farming missed out on the revolution, because the bean just can't come to you - you must go to the bean. By the time of their emancipation, this heavy reliance on slave labor placed the UK occupation ratio in Jamaica at about 1:20. This sort of odds leads to tenuous control positions:
“Everybody get to work immediately or I will give you all a beating!"
“Uh, excuse me?"
“er...give you all your freedom - that's what I said. Everyone, take a coffee break. We'll be off to South Africa now."
From the soap box:
Rev. Bob
I really have to get something constructive to do with my nights.