Royal Geographical Society Conference – AcKnowledging Ethical Economies

Last week I arrived in Manchester, dripping wet and freezing, to present my (unrehearsed, over-long) paper at the Royal Geographical Society conference, whilst wearing bike leathers. I think I made myself memorable! The conference was pretty interesting, but I ended up exhausted by the time it came to the equally cold but spectacular ride home across the Snake pass back to Sheffield. I didn’t die. This is good. There were four sessions per day, all with at least four papers in them. It was a lot to take in, and annoyingly, several sessions which I would have liked to go to, clashed with each other. What I did see though, was all useful stuff.

My paper was called “Creating the Quality market – the ethics of Direct Trade in the Central American  Coffee Industry” and was in the very interesting ‘Acknowledging Ethical Economies” section. It was difficult to judge how relevant mine was; my topic did seem to fit nicely with the original call for papers, as did all the other papers, but they were all very different. Coffee, ethical consumption as opposed to consuming ethically, Pampers nappies, and how business schools approach business ethics and corporate responsibilty. Nice to know human/economic geography is such a varied subject really.This paper was going a little bit off on a tangent from most of my thesis right now, but in all honesty, it was a bit more interesting to me that most of the stuff I am supposed to be writing at the minute and a good excuse for a subtly disguised rant. It wasn’t the best presentation I’ve ever done, so I’m trying to tidy it up a bit here, and hopefully something will be salvageable from it to go in the seemingly unending quality chapter I’m supposed to do for the thesis in… about a week. Gulp.

I do think that this ‘quality market’ is very relevant though – and the ethics of it are my main concern on a personal level, if not an academic one. I have written about quality so often, and there are so many ways of defining what ‘quality coffee’ actually is. A huge range of factors affect the coffee’s quality – from human skill in picking the berries without damaging the plants and processing it correctly, to maintaining the crop between harvests and so on; to non-human agents, the weather, the altitude, the temperature, the machinery used in processing.

Interestingly translated cupping form - I love "Not acceptable for Happiness"!

For the sake of simplicity in the paper, I used the SCAA’s definition of ’speciality coffee’ – that is, everything that achieves more than 80 points on their cupping scale. Speciality coffee is sold with the in-built assumption that it is better quality – it is the quality that differentiates it from conventional grade coffee that only gets 60-67 points on the SCAA scale. It is how those points are awarded that is the area of concern here.

Coffee quality is tested and analysed by ‘cupping’ it – essentially, tasting it, and the process is very similar to wine-tasting. Some parts of the cupping process are as standardized as possible – same weight of coffee grounds in the same amount of water at the same temperature, same roast level etc. Cupping laboratories are virtually identical the world over. Most cupping is also done ‘blind’ – that is, the cuppers are not given the name of the producers or the region the coffee is from before tasting, to avoid bias. However, the fact remains that the analysis is still conducted using only the cupper’s sense of taste. Cuppers are specially trained, and able to pick out the subtlties and nuances of different coffees, but their taste perception is still subjective, and extremely variable. Taste can be affected by anything from the cupper having a mild cold, to eating spicy food the night before, or even something as indirect as using fragranced cleaning sprays in the cupping laboratories. However, there are few alternative methods of analysis which would provide useful information. An analysis of the chemical compostion of the beans, for example, wouldn’t really be meaningful to the consumer. Instead, the cupper tests the coffee and grades it on acidity, body, fragrance and aroma, flavour and aftertaste, and overall balance, and gives it a grade out of 100.

This grading is then used to set the price of the coffee. Although the general global price of coffee is set on the New York stock exchange, this is not always an absolute, and there is plenty of scope for negotiation, particularly when coffee is sold by Direct Trade. As explained before on this blog, Direct Trade is an alternative trade model that, in effect, shortens the commodity chain by reducing the number of actors involved – basically cutting out the middlemen. Coffee roasters/retailers go directly to the producing cooperatives to purchase their coffee. This allows the farmers to not only receive a larger share of the final price, but also provides an opportunity for knowledge sharing. Cuppers can share their expert knowledge of the coffee’s flavours, and in turn, the quality, with the producers, helping the farmers learn how to improve their crop. This can be as simple as the cuppers claiming the coffee is overly sweet, for instance, meaning the farmers should not let the beans ferment for so long. It is often the case that within cooperatives who do not employ cuppers themselves, the farmers are effectively working ‘blind’. Most, particularly in Nicaragua, do not drink their own coffee, and so have no idea what it actually tastes like.

Nicaraguan farmers separate good beans from the bad on farms - in this photo, they would sell the coffee on the bottom but drink the bad stuff separated into the basket on the top.

This lack of knowledge on the part of the producers provides ethical problems within the Direct Trade model. The coffee market is still very much skewed in the favour of the buyers. Coffee is produced in the third world and consumed predominantly in the first world, and so the power inequalities are obvious. Coffee is a cash crop; farmers often have no other income, and consequently are forced to sell their coffee for whatever price they can get. This fact, along with the lack of knowledge of the coffee’s quality, and also very little awareness of the global markets, the demand or the monetary value of their crop. Cuppers and buyers, on the other hand, are equipped not only with a vast knowledge of the coffee’s quality and value, and of the sorts of markets they intend eventually to sell to, but also with the advantage of choice. If they do not think a cooperative’s coffee is high quality, they are under no obligation to buy it. Therefore, the cuppers/buyers can effectively control the whole exchange, and effectively decide the incomes of all the farming families that have produced that coffee. This is not to say that all cuppers are determined to rip off, deceive and exploit the farmers, but simple economics dictates that it is never going to be in the interests of the buyers to pay more for the coffee than they actually have to.

Direct Trade does attempt to address this inequality by knowledge-sharing, as previously mentioned. There are farms and cooperatives in the producing countries, who have their own cupping laboratories and train and employ their own cuppers. Having someone from the cooperative with an equal knowledge of the coffee’s quality and value, who can also feed back this information to the farmers, is invaluable not only for improving the quality of all the cooperative’s coffee (assuming non-human, climatic agencies are also beneficial) but also as they provide the cooperative with more negotiating power when coffee is traded. This is starting to happen certainly within the bigger cooperatives but also on large, private plantations. There are some very obvious differences between Nicaraguan coffee production and Costa Rican here. In Costa Rica, more farms are privately owned, and the country is richer, meaning that most coffee farmers have access to better resources – such as the cupping lab. These farms sell their coffee to the first world buyers independently of the state-run cooperatives. As such, these plantation owners are trying to make a profit for themselves, rather than on behalf of a huge group of people – in a way, they have no choice but to learn about quality and the value of their crop in order to survive in the market. The cooperatives, particularly in Nicaragua, do much to protect the farmers and provide shared resources which farmers could not afford alone. But in some respects this also hinders them, because any profit made is shared out as well, and also detailed earlier, the quality of the coffee can vary so dramatically over a small region that no large cooperative can really hope to produce 100% high quality.

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To complicate this situation further, there is the concept of consumer demand. I would argue that the vast majority of coffee consumers do not taste coffee and do not view its quality in the same way the cuppers do. We drink coffee for many reasons – the sociability of coffee shops, fashion, caffeine addiction and so on.

An iced 'coffee' with espresso, chilled milk, cherry syrup, cream and marshmallows. Good, but not really coffee flavoured!

Often, what we drink bears little resemblance to the simply brewed cups in the laboratory – an iced mocha frappe with syrup and cream on top does not leave much opportunity for the taste of the coffee to shine through! When we can taste it, we buy coffee for the flavours we prefer on a personal level, and excellent quality coffee does not necessarily mean that every consumer favours that taste.

We also have very different ideas of what ‘quality’ actually means. My favourite quotation from one of my consumer focus groups is still the response, when asked to define quality, “er.. it doesn’t taste like crap?”. Branding on bags of coffee in the supermarkets, and in coffee shops will always inform the consumer that this is High Quality stuff. But it rarely tells you why it is high quality, because from the consumers’ point of view, how long the beans fermented for, or how thoroughly they were washed is not only not meaningful, it is largely irrelevant. The only thing we have to go on is the price and personal preference. There is also the tricky aspect of ‘ethical consumption’, where coffee consumers are deliberately buying Fair Trade or Organic coffee, and may well be assuming that Fair Trade equals good quality. Although the Fair Trade Foundation do assure us that their coffee is excellent, all the mark on the bag actually tells you is that the buyer paid $1.26 or more for a pound of it, and this is not the same thing at all. In a sense, the buyers and retailers of coffee are not sharing their knowledge and expertise of the commodity with their consumers either, and still leaves me with the question (for which I made myself somewhat notorious at another conference:) Why not let them drink crap if that is what they want??

All this leads to a very odd situation where the buyers and cuppers are effectively creating their own market. The farmers struggle to produce constant, consistant high quality, the consumers cannot and do not demand something which they do not really have much knowledge of. This essentially leaves the buyers/retailers carefully manipulating the branding of coffee to produce a new market controlled by neither producers’ supply nor consumer demand, but by an artificial and highly complex desire for ‘quality’. Most significantly in terms of knowledge-sharing and ethics, it is also a market where both the producer and consumer are in need of ‘education’ in relation to coffee and its quality.

Direct Trade then, does go some way towards bringing the consumers more in touch with the commodity’s producers. It does allows the producers a larger share of the price, and when expert knowledge of quality is shared between cuppers working at the cooperatives and the farmers themselves, it can help reduce the power inequalities during trade negotiations, far more effectively than with similar initiatives within conventional trade models. However, it is not a complete solution. Cuppers/buyers still have an unfair influence over the prices of coffee as a result of their greater product knowledge and market awareness, often leaving the producers unable to challenge them. When these buyers are setting the price for coffee without sharing their knowledge of its quality or value with the producers, then this trade model cannot be the most ethical or egalitarian. Further still, when faced with the idea that the demand for this quality may not actually come from the consumers, it raises further ethical questions about the nature of the whole cupping process, and whether or not it is actually necessary at all.

Jack and the Beanstalk

One day Jack’s mother cried, “We’re stoney broke!
Go out and find some wealthy bloke
Who’ll buy our cow. Just say she’s sound
And worth at least a hundred pounds-
But don’t you dare to let him know
That she’s as old as Billy-O!”
Jack led the old brown cow away
And came back later in the day,
And said, “Mum! I got, I really don’t know how,
A super trade-in for our cow!”
Jack’s mother said, “You little creep,
I bet you sold her much too cheap!”
When Jack produced one lousy bean,
His startled mother, turning green,
Leaped high into the air and cried:
“I’m absolutely stupified!
You crazy boy, you really mean
You sold our Daisy for a bean?!”
She snatched the bean, and yelled “You chump!”
And flung it on the rubbish dump.
Then, summoning up all her power,
She beat the boy for half an hour,
(Using, and nothing could be meaner,
The handle of a vaccuum cleaner!)

(from Roald Dahl’s Jack and the Beanstalk, c. 1988? If its not completely accurate it is because the above is written from memory alone, I learned the whole thing off by heart when at Primary school – 16 years ago, and I haven’t seen a copy since)

It is true, there is very little in the world that I can’t relate to coffee nowadays. I’d like to construct an elaborate, aetelogical myth of coffee origins, of epic length, and possibly even in iambic pentameter. This may yet happen, in a few weeks time I will be embarking on an uncomfy nine-hour bus journey to Costa Rica- perfect opportunity for some wanton scribbling….

But for now, let us stick with Jack and his magic beans. Ahem. The moral of this particular version of the story is that taking baths is a good idea. Jack defeats the giant by having a wash so the giant can’t smell him. (“A bath,” he said, “does seem to pay, I’m going to have one every day!”)
So far, so non-coffee related.
But, and whilst being heavy handed with the dramatic licence, I could argue that an equal valid lesson here is to trust in the magic beans, for they will eventually bring you great wealth. Sure, it won’t be easy, but it’s always going to be better than cattle farming!

Well, maybe. At the top of the beanstalk there is wealth, but that wealth is guarded carefully by the Giant. More on the Giant in a minute.

During my time in Nicaragua, I’ve visited four completely different coffee farms. All the farmers at these places have traded in their cows, received their magic beans, and have grown their beanstalks accordingly.
At the first farm, the beanstalk was of great quality and held a lot of golden fruit, and ‘Jack’ there found that, when you got to the top, the Giant wasn’t actually that big and scary after all. In fact, he and the Giant are good friends now.
At Farm number 2, having discovered the Giant at the top of the first beanstalk, Jack constructed a second beanstalk – ok, it wasn’t a fantastic beanstalk, it wasn’t even organic, but then, the Giant wasn’t that intelligent, and when he was guarding the top of the first stalk, Jack could nip up the other one, and still get to the gold.
At the third farm, Jack roped in all his mates from his village, and even some curious tourists who wanted to see the view from the top of beanstalk. Together, they were too much for the one poor giant, and Jack was able to collect all the gold and share it out with all his friends. Except the tourists, who just went home feeling very good about themselves for helping out poor little Jack.
But at the last farm, the smallest of them all, Jack’s beanstalk grew very very tall, and the Giant was very big. The gold was a long way up, and the beanstalk didn’t look very safe. Jack tried to climb this beanstalk but was scared to go too high in case he fell, so he had to make do with the few tiny bits of gold that he was able to reach. After a while, well-meaning health and safety inspectors came to see Jack’s beanstalk, and constructed a safety net for him around the beanstalk, so if he fell, he wouldn’t fall too far. But even so, this Jack had very little chance of ever even reaching the top of his beanstalk, let alone defeating the Giant and collecting the gold for himself.
However, this Jack, with some help from other members of the Tall Beanstalk Owners Cooperative and Support Group, came up with a cunning plan. They would just get their own Giant, to climb the stalks for them!

Maybe this does need a little more explanation. ‘Jack’ is of course, the different sorts of farmer, and the beanstalk is the coffee crop. The gold is the money they could make from this coffee. And in more than one of these examples, the farmers literally did trade their cows for beans. The safety net on the fourth farm is the Fair Trade guaranteed minimum price. The tourists on Farm #3 are the beginnings of volunteer and ecotourism projects here.

But what is the Giant? I hear you cry…
This is what I have been trying to work out myself. The Giant represents everything unjust in the coffee industry, it is he who gathers all the money for himself, keeping it from the farmers who have actually done the hard work growing the beanstalks in the first place. The Giant is not, however, the average coffee drinker. In this story, the Giant might even be wearing a green apron, and selling huge and very sweet bean-flavoured milkshakes to coffee drinkers, for extortionate prices. It is the money from this that the Giant wants to stop Jack getting his hands on.

This Giant represents the international coffee markets, and specifically the buyers, the middlemen. In Nicaragua, foreign coffee buyers are known as Coyotes, a name which conjours up exactly the same image as these people have in this country – not a pleasant reputation at all. The correct name is actually ‘Catadores’, those who work in La Catacion, or coffee cuppers. They are the people who taste and sample the coffee, and judge its quality using pseudo-scientific, but usually pretty subjective methods. As a result, they also control the price of this coffee – if they think it is not good quality, they will only pay a very small price for it. And then, they have a tendancy of adding on a huge price mark up, and selling it on to coffee shops to make big profits. In this situation, Jack can only hope that his Giant is honest. Jack struggles to produce the best beanstalk he can, so that a little of the Giant’s wealth trickles down to him.

This has been the situation for quite some time. But in the last decade at least, the Jacks of Central America have been fighting back. One tactic, not available to most, is to simple make friends with the Giant, so that he wants to share his gold with you. This requires Jack to be pretty wealthy to start with so that the Giant does not appear too big and scary. In other words, this can only be achieved on huge, successful and usually foreign-owned coffee farms.

Another tactic is to grow a second beanstalk. Growing non-organic low grade coffee alongside high quality stuff, is easier and cheaper to produce, and provides a failsafe for when the Giant guards the wealth on the first beanstalk.

Thirdly, Jack can rope in the help of his friends – as in, work in cooperatives, and share the wealth from all the little beanstalks out fairly. Again, this only works if there is enough good quality beanstalks – and having a great view from the top of them helps to promote foreign interest as well.

Finally, to help the really impoverished Jacks with their tall beanstalks, some places are trying to find their own Giants. Cooperatives and companies like Cecocafen have created their own cupping laborotories, and trained their own cuppers to assess the quality of their own coffee – inside this country. This allows Jack to understand the value of his beanstalk, and also teaches him how to look after it and improve it. However, this Giant is still independent of Jack- he won’t say it’s a lovely beanstalk when it isn’t. But this Giant is at least tame and friendly, and can really help defend Jack against the Big, Scary foreign Giants that might otherwise keep all the gold for themselves.

I’ve already met the local catadores at Santa Emilia, and tomorrow I am set to meet up with Julio, who is one of the cuppers at Cecocafen. I still have my doubts about cupping, but mainly because it still seems to me to be incredibly subjective. However, if having their own cupping lab really does benefit the farmers, then so be it!

Once more Jack climbed the mighty bean,
The Giant sat there, gross, obscene,
Muttering through his viscous teeth
Whilst Jack sat tensely just beneath.
“Fi Fie Fo Fum,
Right now I can’t smell anyone!”
Jack waited til the Giant slept,
Then out along the boughs he crept
And gathered so much gold, I swear
He was an instant millionaire.

First official attempt at coffee cupping

Disclaimers:
I know how cupping should be done; I know that I am supposed to use very small samples of single origin green coffee beans, roasted to order to a light Vienna or half-City roast. I should then grind these to French Press level – not too coarse, not too fine. Then I have to smell it. Then I add boiled water straight on top of the beans, and allow it to cool and for the grinds to settle. After that I break the ‘crust’ – that is, all the grinds still forming a skin on the surface of the liquid, with my trusty Cupping Spoon, smell it again, then slurp it off the spoon, and slosh it round my mouth. Unlike wine tasting, I have to swallow it, because I am also supposed to record the aftertaste as well. After washing mouth out with water, I am supposed to repeat this with many different types of coffee from many different origins. There are people who are paid to do this. These people, be it unwittingly in some cases, hold a great deal of power: if they don’t like the flavours and aromas of the coffees they’ve cupped, it doesn’t command a high price globally. Given the state of the gree coffee market at the moment, this can actually mean life or death, survival or starvation for the farmers.

Not wishing to demonstrate any signs of hubris, I am not going to ‘cup’ in this manner. Mainly because I can’t – I have no access to green beans, single origin or otherwise. I have no roasting machine. I do not have a grinder of sufficient quality. Also, pouring hot water on to coffee grounds does not for a pleasant drink make, anyway. And finally, because I sincerely doubt anyone really cares what I think of coffee.

Instead, what I have got is independent-coffee-shop house blend, called Mokarabia. It’s an 100% arabica blend, from Costa Rica and Mexico. Espresso roasted – that is, very dark, the grinds are almost black, and still shiny with oils. (which is unusual for 100% arabica). This roast has less of the sweetness and caffeine, and more of the smoky, heavy flavours, designed to make good, Italian style espresso. I am putting it in my little French Press pot – a cafetiere to anyone who isn’t American. This means that the coffee is squashed through the hot water and reserved. I won’t get the ‘crust’ to break through as I would with traditional cupping, but this method does at least produce a palatable cup of coffee!!

At first sniff, the ground coffee smells delicious. Not a strong, overpowering smell – though this is possibly because it is not freshly ground. It is sweet, like melting black chocolate, but the smell in the air is more vanilla and caramel. It is almost synthetic, far more like the blasphemous Frappe Lattes at Caffe Nero, where the tiniest amount of espresso is drowned in a pint of milk and blended with vanilla-sugar powder. To me, this would make a good after-dinner coffee, possibly with a shot of rum in it.

Pouring on the hot water releases a whole new array of smells; not very pleasant ones, either. Very acrid and slightly bitter, and smoky to the point of being burnt. Hot rubber: like burning tyres from a distance. You know it’s there but it’s not choking. Nothing like the scent of the grounds on their own, but also nothing like the scent you are supposed to perfume your home with to lure estate agents….

Pressing it and pouring it rids it of unpleasant burnt aromas, it is still smoky but with a savoury, nutty tone. On first taste, there are walnut notes, a slight metallic base. The flavour is acidic but not heavy. A big slurp (and I like doing this) results in a full, strong but bright flavour – ‘clean’ in that it doesn’t cling round the mouth, and there are some hints of the fruity black chocolate that the original smell promised. The aftertaste is nicely bitter but floral – to me, it tastes like eating dandelion stalks. It does not linger too long.

Interestingly, in swigging this (8oz cup, black, unadulterated), I still get the little buzz of the stimulants. I know that this blend/roast would rid the coffee of most of its natural caffeine, so maybe it is psychological. The colour and the fragrance give the impression that this is strong coffee, and guzzling any hot liquid quickly and actually concentrating on the drink must focus and stimulate the brain a little!

Such is my first recorded tasting. I don’t think I’ll be indulging in this experiment again. As with any food critiquing, identifying flavours and fragrances has a tendency to sound highly pretentious. Also, I don’t think it says anything useful about the coffee. Dandelions, metallic notes, burning tyres, bitter black chocolate, smoke, acidity… none of them sound particularly appealing! Overall, the coffee tastes good. It tastes like Good Coffee. I may not be a supertaster, with my tongue honed and trained to pick up every little subtlety, but then, that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate coffee. I certainly drink enough of it. Personally, although finding these flavours is interesting, and testing my taste ability is a new experience, I can’t see much use in being able to pronounce a coffee ‘floral’ or ‘acidic’ or even why I should want to!