bolivia, coffee, and cascara

one of the few upsides of working from home is being able to pour myself a fine cup of joe before starting work, a luxury i cannot afford in the office where i work. i know life is hell for others right now though and i feel scared for many people out there. so even with this small comfort, i wouldn't wish this nightmare to continue for anyone.

the cafe i frequent friday evenings (Another Land) decided to close around two weeks ago. to keep some income trickling in, it's been offering bean delivery. last time i checked in with them, their landlord hadn't offered any rent relief. it's a very small cafe owned and run (almost solo) by a person who both lacks the pretension some cafes feel obliged to perform (lol jk) and is also extremely knowledgeable about coffee. i don't live near the cafe, but enough people in Mississauga were interested in coffee delivery that she was willing to make the trip out to here. being the swell person she is, she included some bonus coffee in the mix, and one of these was a Bolivian coffee roasted by Monogram.

it was a caturra varietal, which is a natural mutation from the bourbon variety (a fairly sought after coffee variety that i've heard does well at lots of competitions, but i don't know anything about how that stuff works). caturra was discovered in Brazil around the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. the word 'caturra' comes from the Guarani word for 'small'. these are dwarf coffee plants that can be planted much closer together, and therefore increase yield per square meter of land. this particular coffee from Monogram wasn't bad, but when i drank it side by side with one of Monogram's Ethiopian coffees, it was somewhat outshone. of the notes listed, i think plum is probably the strongest when it cools. it is a muted sort of acidity, grapefruit sounds about right, and any almond notes i was getting were the flat nutty almond notes, not the fragrant almond you'd find in an almond extract (i.e. benzaldehyde). for an overview on Bolivia's coffee terroir these are some excerpts from James Hoffmann's World Atlas of Coffee:

"The conditions for growing coffee in Bolivia are, in many ways, ideal. There is certainly the necessary altitude, and the climate has nicely defined wet and dry seasons. Most of the coffee grown here is old heirloom varieties, such as Typica and Caturra. Some excellent, clean and complex coffees have been coming out of Bolivia recently, although this wasn’t always the case...

Coffees in Bolivia are typically traceable down to a single farm or cooperative. Due to land reforms, large-scale land ownership has reduced since 1991, and the 23,000 families that produce coffee in Bolivia do so from small farms, typically 1.2–8 hectares (3–20 acres). The export of Bolivia’s output is handled by a small number, around thirty, of private exporting companies...

Approximately 95 per cent of Bolivia’s coffee is produced in this region, and in the past it held a reputation for quality in Europe, though less so recently. It can be defined as the region of forest stretching down the east side of the Andes, and in fact crosses from Peru through Bolivia into Argentina. The region produces some of the highest-altitude coffee in the world and this is also where coffee has been grown the longest in Bolivia...

As the region is so large, many coffee roasters describe coffees as being from a more specific area, such as Caranavi, Inquisivi or Coroico, within the region.”

i tried this coffee both on V60 and Chemex, and preferred the Chemex for it. for reference, with the Hario V60, i typically use the '4:6 method', essentially five pours (70g-50g-60g-60g-60g) each spread out by 45 seconds, and on Chemex i typically do three pours (~70g-130g-100g) within three minutes. i use ~21g of ground coffee for both recipes. my grind is probably medium coarse, but i have an awful manual burr grinder that produces fairly inconsistent grinds, and i'm not willing to spend money on a nice grinder.

if the stuff i just wrote about makes little sense to you, that's probably a good thing. i have very ambiguous feelings towards so-called 'specialty coffee' or 'third wave coffee'. on the one hand, my taste in coffee generally aligns with coffee labelled as such. lighter roasted with some acidity, fruity and floral notes etc. i also think it's fun to play around with different drippers and things; there's a whole world of little toys out there with filters, goose-neck kettles, conical burr grinders, special sorts of cups and glasses. it's definitely a consumerist world unto itself. the sort of 'system of objects' Baudrillard elaborated on in his early semi-Marxist years, writing his doctoral thesis under Lefebvre. then you have the coffee itself with its variety of roast profiles, the processing of beans, the botanical variety of the coffee plant, and the details of terroir and origin (country, elevation, farms, lots, etc). it can be exhausting, but it can also be a lot of fun if you are in a particular mood, or if you possess a particular sort of personality. what i'm cautious about though is lauding the moral underpinnings of this world of coffee. i think a very good critical/Marxist introduction or description of 'third wave coffee' is a paper by Edward F. Fischer called "Quality and Inequality: Taste, Value, and Power in the Third Wave Coffee Market".

this niche of the coffee industry can sometimes be a little self-congratulatory, believing transparency necessarily affords a fairer and more just distribution of money, power, resources, etc. in fact, there are many cases in which i can see direct trade as actually worse than fair trade from a moral or political standpoint. both are ultimately inadequate. most consumers of so-called 'specialty coffee' remain in over-developed countries, or affluent pockets of the so-called 'global south'. the value chain is heavily skewed towards stages of production closer to consumers. the roasters and their capital (expensive roasting machines) scoop a good portion of the value from that chain. i suspect the biggest margins are found in the distribution of graded green beans, which tend to be large conglomerations. i think this remains one of the most obfuscated sections of the supply chain. as an end-consumer, its easy to think of specialty coffee as special hand-crafted end products of down-home mom & pop shops run by savvy millennials who practice progressive politics, but there's a whole lot of corporate machinery behind it all.

as an example, one of the biggest distributors of specialty coffee green beans now is the agri-business giant Olam, who have their own division just for specialty coffee. Olam has been on my radar because it is headquartered in Singapore (though originally from Nigeria, the British colonial networks of the so-called 'commonwealth' remain strong, even today). like many agri-business corporations of its size, it has done a lot of morally objectionable things involved with the palm oil industry (despite its attempts to greenwash its reputation with 'sustainable' palm oil programs), its attendant deforestation, land grabs, and the forced evictions of small land holders and their families (e.g. in Laos).

another portion of the supply chain involves wet mill owners. basically the people who own the expensive capital used to process coffee cherries into green beans ready for export. what i will concede is that transparency of third wave coffee norms does permit me to dig a little to find out where my coffee is coming from and garner a sense of how that money is trickling down (because it really is a very sad trickle that often barely reaches the farm workers themselves).

i did not buy this coffee, at least not in the direct sense, but like i said earlier, it was some bonus coffee that the person at Another Land threw in to my bag as a nice gesture. anyway, in the case of this Bolivian coffee by Monogram, they're sourcing it from a Bolivian company called Agricafe which is framed as a family business. Monogram's bag label says the coffee was a part of Agricafe's Sol De La Mañana program, which Agricafe describes as:

"a quest to educate local producers by providing training and skills necessary to improve the quality of their farms. By using the knowledge we have acquired on our Buena Vista farms we work with producers to start nurseries and educate them on how to properly look after their farms, prevent infections and harvest their berries. We now have 60 producers enrolled in the program and the aim is to have 100, representing roughly 200 hectares of pristine coffee farms." 

Agricafe own the Buena Vista Mill in the Caranavi region, as well as a cafe and roastery in Santa Cruz the predominantly white metropolis of Bolivia. For some context, Santa Cruz is somewhat of a hotbed for racist separatist politics, basically white people who want to remove themselves from the rest of the indigenous population of Bolivia. there is an article in NACLA on it, and Nicole Fabricant in Dissent Magazine describes Santa Cruz in this way:

"While many have portrayed Bolivia’s right as a creation that grew in reaction to Morales, there is a long history of right-wing separatist organizing in Santa Cruz, the eastern Bolivian department that makes up roughly a third of the country’s territory (and is responsible for a similar portion of Bolivian GDP). In the nineteenth century, Santa Cruz reaped the benefits of the mining resources in the western highlands. But in the mid-twentieth century, the United States began to invest millions of dollars in lowland agro-industrial development, helping forge a new entrepreneurial-minded elite in Santa Cruz."

while there are many things put out by the Grayzone that i have certain disagreements with, i find their coverage on Latin America very useful. in an article on the recent coup in Bolivia, Blumenthal and Norton write:

"Luis Fernando Camacho rose to political prominence months ago, but cemented his status as coup figurehead after he broke into the Palacio Quemado, Bolivia’s presidential palace, with police assistance. In a bizarre act of colonialist kabuki theater, he placed a Bolivian flag and enormous Bible on the floor and declared that God had returned to the Presidential Palace. Moments later, the pastor by Camacho’s side promised that “Pachamama will never return to the palace,” in a reference to the Andean spirit of Mother Earth. As the former leader of the undeniably fascistic Union Juvenil Crucenista paramilitary and the separatist Santa Cruz Committee, Camacho has struggled to shake off a history of white supremacy and anti-indigenous violence."

for a more extensive analysis of the Bolivian coup, Blumenthal's interview on Struggle Session and Ben Norton's interview on The Red Nation Podcast are very useful framings of what's been going on in Bolivia the past year.

as for this Bolivian coffee's distributor, Agricafe, it is owned by the Rodriguez family, more specifically Pedro Rodriguez who is profiled on the Melbourne Coffee Merchants site as someone who ditched:

"his suit and his accounting job to pursue his passion for agriculture. Fifteen years ago, Pedro recognised the potential for specialty coffee in Bolivia, and over the last decade, he has built a visionary business called Agricafe, which focuses on building long-term relationships with producers, based on mutual trust and benefit... Many of the Caranavi-based producers deliver their whole cherries to Agricafe’s Buena Vista Mill in Caranavi. This meticulously run mill processes many of its lots separately, allowing for full traceability back to the individual farmer or colony."

a while ago, I also bought a package of 'cascara tea' from Another Land that was also packaged by Monogram, but purchased from the Rodriguez family farm operations. coffee 'beans' are actually the seeds of coffee fruit, and that coffee fruit when removed can be dried and used as a tisane infusion.

for months before then I had been searching out somewhere i could get my hands on some cascara. i have since discovered the coffee cherries themselves go bad very quickly, so best way to try the coffee cherry was as a tisane infusion. i was hoping they could make something like raisins or dates out of coffee berries, but i haven't been able to find something like that. anyway, i knew Pilot had a cascara tisane product on their website, and my mom travels through Union Station everyday so i asked her if she could pick me up a bag, but Pilot's Union Station location never seemed to carry the cascara product. so when Another Land got in some from Monogram back in 2019 i bought some home for myself. the tea's predominant notes remind me of red date tea. i also tried to make Qishr back then, which is a Yemeni tisane made with cascara, ginger, and cinnamon. i didn't get the proportions right, and never tried to remake it again. i hopefully will revisit Qishr another time. i recently found my package of cascara neglected in a back shelf where i keep coffee and tea, and thought i'd make some cascara syrup that i could use to make some cascara soda and cascara butter.

the two recipes i saw for cascara syrup involved: (1) a Blue Bottle recipe for cascara butter on bon appetit and (2) a Counter Culture recipe for cascara soda. i think i probably used about 1 cup of sugar and 1.5 cups of water to make this syrup, and i used the same syrup for the cascara butter toast as i used for the cascara soda and i think both worked out fine.

ideally the syrup for cascara butter toast should have had a lot more sugar in it for thickness, and the syrup for the cascara soda should have had less. anyhow, these are some pictures of cascara toast i made loosely based on Blue Bottle's recipe:

and this is how the cascara soda turned out:

i also had all those cascara fragments left over, so i soaked them in some gin and seltzer and the resultant beverage had a sort of lychee flavour that i found quite pleasant.

anyway, i wanted to get back into the messy politics of Bolivian agriculture. so both the coffee and the cascara mentioned here, packaged by Monogram, was processed by way of the Rodriguez family operations. this sort of transparency may or may not be helpful, but i'll use it as a case study to explore the potential benefit of this transparency. firstly, Pedro Rodriguez conveniently has twitter, and so the list of people he follows gives some decent insight into his sort of politics, something fairly in line with what one might expect from a wealthy landowner who can afford the capital to set up a coffee processing plant and essentially carry out USAID extension work to 'train' farmers to 'develop' their land using 'modern' farming practices. this comes through even in the Monogram description of the coffee, describing one farmer's participation in the Agricafe's Sol De La Mañana program:

"This is Luis’ third year in the program and we have been so impressed by his commitment to following the strict standards set out by the program."

this is the sort of Foucauldian disciplining process very well aligned with James Ferguson's critique of international development in books like The Anti-Politics Machine. as for Pedro Rodriguez's twitter account, firstly, he marks his location as Santa Cruz (which is somewhat telling). secondly, he follows most high-ranking officials of the new coup government of Bolivia who belong to the right-wing Democrat Social Movement party. for a run down of the coup government this article on Jacobin provides a decent summary. thirdly, Rodriguez follows an 'anti-Chavista' account, many anti-Morales accounts, as well as figures like Bolsonaro and Guaido. i mean not extremely unexpected. he's a businessman. he owns the means of production. socialism is a threat to him. that's mainly why i believe movements in coffee such as 'direct trade' do little to address the root issues of inequality and injustice in any coffee production system under capitalism. this anti-socialist rhetoric shows up in many journals written by coffee roasters visiting 'origin'. here's one example from Melbourne Coffee Merchants:

"When we first started sourcing coffee from Bolivia in 2011, annual exports were around 70,000 bags (which, to put it in perspective, is equivalent to the annual output of one large farm in Brazil). Over the last few years this production has more than halved to a devastating 22,000 bags per annum in 2017. There are several factors contributing to this decline. One is that coffee competes with the local coca industry, and coca is easier to pick, harvests all year round and often yields higher profits for farmers. The coca plantations have a devastating impact on the land and the communities in the long term; untouched rainforest is often illegally destroyed to plant coca, and a lack of shade trees leads to huge problems with erosion. The excessive use of biocides by coca producers in an effort to bolster their crops also renders the soil infertile over time, and the land is then abandoned as nothing else can be grown there. The absence of a centralised body to support and promote coffee production has also threatened the vitality of coffee trade in Bolivia. Unlike other coffee-producing countries, such as Guatemala or Brazil, coffee producers in Bolivia receive no support from the government or national agricultural bodies. Historically, a lot of support was given to the Bolivian coffee industry by the US (trying to encourage the growth of alternative crops to coca) however President Evo Morales, (who himself is an ex-coca grower) stopped accepting all US aid two years ago."

it's fascinating to see the way coca farms are framed, as well as the allusions to Evo Morales as a colluder with the illicit narcotics industry, whose support of coca plantations ravage the land and destroy ecosystems, when academic coverage of Bolivia has tended to paint the picture inversely. there are many things to address here including the significance of the coca plant to indigenous peoples of Bolivia, the political interference that USAID was involved in which got them kicked out of Bolivia, and the sorts of coercive 'alternative development' programs USAID was running. let's start with this description of the coca plant by Amy Stewart in her book "The Drunk Botanist":

“No plant is more symbolic of our endless war on drugs than this small, dark green Andean bush. When the leaves are chewed, they act as a gentle stimulant and may offer protection against altitude sickness. Archeologists have found evidence that Peruvians used the plant in this manner as early as 3000 BC, and they were still using it when the Spaniards showed up in the sixteenth century. The Catholic church tried to ban it but quickly realized that enslaved Peruvians could be made to work harder if they had their coca, so it remained a part of the culture...

The FDA has approved “Coca (decocainized)” as a food additive, and one American manufacturer, the Stepan Company in New Jersey, has been granted the license to legally purchase the leaves from Peru’s National Coca Company. It separates the cocaine alkaloid for use as a topical anesthetic, and sells the remaining flavoring to companies like Coca-Cola. Not to be outdone, the Bolivian government has funded the creation of a number of coca-flavored sodas and other products, arguing that it is hypocritical for the United States to sanction the use of the leaves in American soft drinks while frowning on local products made from the same plant.” 

Next, unlike the way Melbourne Coffee Merchants place the onus for USAID's exodus from Bolivia on Morales and the consequent decline of the coffee industry, I think its worth noting the way USAID was funding political opposition groups for the particular purpose of securing American interests in the region. There are so-called "decentralization" programs that USAID funded which were basically in support of separatist groups in Eastern Bolivia that I mentioned previously (the ones concentrated in Santa Cruz). An article by Eva Golinger on NACLA describes some of these efforts by USAID revealed by documents declassified over a decade ago:

"One document, classified as “sensitive”, explains that this particular program began when USAID established an Office for Transition Initiatives (OTI) en Bolivia during 2004. The OTIs are a division of USAID that function as rapid response teams to political crises in countries strategically important to US interests. The OTI only address political issues, despite USAID’s principal mission dedicated to humanitarian aid and development assistance, and they generally have access to large amounts of liquid funds in order to quickly and efficiently achieve their objectives...
After Morales was elected president at the end of 2005, OTI directed the majority of its funding and work to the separatist projects that later produced regional referendums on autonomy in Eastern Bolivia. Their principal idea is to divide Bolivia into two separate republics, one governed by an indigenous majority and the other run by European descendents and mestizos that inhabit the areas rich in natural resources, such as gas and water. After 2007, the OTI, which had an additional budget of $13.3 million on top of USAID’s general Bolivia program funding, was absorbed into USAID/Bolivia’s Democracy Program, which since then has been dedicating resources to consolidating the separatist projects...
...It’s no coincidence that the separatist initiatives are all concentrated in areas rich in gas, water and economic power. The multi-million dollar funding from USAID to the separatist projects in Bolivia has encouraged and emboldened destabilization activities during the past few years, including extreme violence and racism against Indigenous communities, terrorist acts and even assassination attempts against President Morales."

Ok, so that's the darker more covert work USAID was involved in in Bolivia. But what was some USAID's more beneficial coffee-related work in the country? So part of the United States' interests in Latin America is the curtailing of coca cultivation, due to their inability to manage the cocaine crisis within their own borders. so USAID has been trying to find alternative cash crops in coca-producing countries to try to drastically decrease the cultivation of coca. USAID saw the emergence of the 'specialty coffee' market as a way to shift agriculture away from coca plants. This is an excerpt from a book called Habeas Coca by Linda C. Farthing and Kathryn Ledebur:

"In the Yungas, since 2006, the National Fund for Alternative Development (FONADAL) with EU and Bolivian state funding, has successfully worked with participating families and their unions in programs emphasizing food security. For the first time, other crops have provided significant income alongside coca. Built on the foundation of an earlier USAID program to develop specialty coffee markets, Yungeña coffee captured soaring prices in 2011 and 2012 encouraging a boost in production. In 2012, Yungas coffee outpaced coca in value and acreage, but by early 2013, international prices had tumbled (even though there was steady recovery in late 2014 and 2015), undermining coffee’s attractiveness as a substitute for coca."

so farmers show an openess to diversifying their crops away from coca monocultures, but most USAID programs have refused to work with growers unions and have a zero-tolerance policy for growing coca. so what happens if the price of coffee falls as it did in 2013, and all these farmers have planted is coffee? most of these USAID programs have been failures, something not openly recognized in most of these specialty coffee write-ups i've seen on Bolivia. this is Farthing and Ledebur again:

"Largely ineffective alternative development programs accompanied the emphasis on coca eradication. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) spent an estimated $300 million between 1982 and 2008 on programs that refused to work with grower unions and conditioned assistance on eradication. For many years, the program, one of USAID’s largest in Latin America, focused on increasing the exports of legal crops and therefore participant farmers’ licit income. The program also emphasized non-coca farmer private sector investment including tourism infrastructure, and was most successful in extending Chapare road infrastructure. Farmers consistently complained about a lack of transparency, markets, and inefficacy. In the Yungas, a five-year UN Fund for Drug Abuse Control (UNFDAC) crop substitution program, known as AgroYungas, spent $21 million in the late 1980s and proved a resounding failure. The coffee varieties introduced were more susceptible to disease than local ones and market research was absent. Communities as a whole had to give up coca before participating, which generated inter-community conflict. Even though most participants already grew more coffee than coca, farmers tended to view the program as a threat to their livelihoods. Beginning in 2001, USAID had greater success in expanding specialty coffee production, in part because of improved coffee processing, growing international demand for high-end coffee, and sophisticated marketing, although the project remained susceptible to dramatic price fluctuations."

as Evo Morales had mentioned on multiple occasions, the large majority of cocaine in the US supply was derived from coca cultivated in Colombia not in Bolivia, yet the USAID continued to carry out extremely aggressive programs to eradicate a plant that was considered sacred to so many indigenous people in Bolivia. and the hypocrisy of the US propping up right-wing dictators connected to actual narcotic trafficking in Hondouras has been pointed out by people like Ben Norton.

so, as i sip on cascara soda or Bolivian caturra i can't help but feel the shadow of imperialist intervention swimming about the glass between my fingers. the fact that USAID imperialism is so entrenched in the creation of 'specialty coffee' markets, the subsidizing of processing plants for already wealthy entrepreneurs, and hosting Cups of Excellence competitions in collaboration with the Specialty Coffee Association is a little disquieting to me. and why should Evo Morales have diverted limited resources away from food sovereignty programs for export oriented commodities for affluent market segments with fickle tastes and unreliable interest and demand. when it takes years for coffee plants to go to fruit, and a significant investment in time and resources, who is bearing the brunt of the risk and who is being compensated? in this paper by Grisaffi and Lebedur, they write about USAID's 'alternative development' projects saddling some farmers with unpayable debts:

"USAID did not carry out viability studies to see if there were markets for these products and made little effort to open out new ones. Thus most farmers found that they could not sell their ‘alternative’ crops and sank into debt, unable to repay loans they had been encouraged to take out in order to plant the crops in the first place"

fair trade is not enough, and nor is direct trade. until workers can control the means of production democratically, risk is properly distributed across various sectors, information is not asymmetrically accessible, and wealth is spread justly across the value chain, no one deserves to sit contentedly by and believe that ethical consumption is possible under this current stage of capitalism. the current Bolivian coup government only makes the whole thing more unsettling. what will Christofascism bring to the indigenous coffee farmers in Caranavi? Bolivia has abundant lithium mines (which are likely going to be powering the coming 'Green New Deal') and will indigenous rural communities see any of this wealth or will it stay neatly separated out, confined to the European-descendant elite of Santa Cruz? with COVID-19 still present, elections have been pushed back tentatively to June. we will see how this all turns out.