COFFEE

OPPRESSION AND IMAGERY

BY ROBERT H. BATES

HARVARD MAGAZINE MARCH-APRIL 1997

I

STUDY THE POLITICS AND ECONOMICS OF DEVELOPMENT

and have long specialized in the study of Africa. So when I was asked in 1981 by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to advise them on how best to restructure the bureaucracy in charge of exporting coffee from Uganda, I jumped at the opportunity. Thus began a nearly 15-year sojourn in the world of coffee.

I began this journey in the early 1980s as a consultant in eastern Africa and ended it in the 1990s as a researcher in Latin America. Over the course of the journey, I learned much; but some of the most important lessons will not appear in scholarly publications. These lessons include a deepened understanding of politics, and the sheer excitement of research. Such lessons are too broad to be communicated with precision, but they are too important not to be shared. They are the kinds of lessons that are best communicated by telling how they were learned.

In 1979, rebels backed by Tanzania overthrew Idi Amin, Uganda’s notorious dictator, and foreign governments welcomed Uganda back into the community of nations, dispatching teams of advisers to design development projects that they could assist financially. USAID recruited me to lead a team from the United States. Accompanied by Robert Hahn—a gifted economist who was then a graduate student—I spent the fall of 1981 in Uganda, preparing a report on how best to restructure its coffee industry. The World Bank acquired my report to USAID, liked it, and asked me to implement its recommendations. So I returned to Uganda in 1982 for an additional six weeks. And throughout the 1980s, I returned to East Africa to study the impact of the droughts that periodically assaulted the region. On each trip, I would pause in London to share information and findings with the staff of the International Coffee Organization (ICO), an agency that until 1989 regulated world trade in coffee. Each year the Office of the United States Trade Representative dispatched a delegation to the meetings of the ICO. In 1985, I was appointed to the U.S. delegation and returned, this time as a diplomat, to the world of coffee.

By the late 1980s I was at last able to enter this world as a researcher. Long aware that the major economic and political forces shaping the coffee market originated in Latin America, I struggled to learn Spanish and Portuguese and, supported by the National Science Foundation, began research in that region. I burrowed through archives, interviewed officials, and traveled throughout the coffee zones in Colombia and Brazil, the two largest producers of the beverage. I then journeyed to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences to write up my results. Unpacking dusty boxes that bore dates that ranged over decades and addresses that ranged over continents, I pieced together what I had learned.

My book appeared this winter. But when publishing books and articles, scholars too often leave valuable material on the cutting-room floor. I take this opportunity to share these outtakes. These lessons run deep; they shape who I am and affect my attitude toward my field, my research, my students. They are the kinds of lessons that students should learn, but which we academics rarely impart.

THE POLITICAL PREMISE: SAVORING THE NIGHT

M

Y initial work in uganda proved highly successful. Robert Hahn furnished the kind of applied economics that has come to distinguish his professional work, while I addressed several difficult aspects of the proposed reforms. We established effective working relationships with our Ugandan colleagues. Our report was well received by the Ugandan government and donor community. Our mission was a success. Yet I left Uganda feeling deeply troubled, for while residing there, I had been living in fear.

Of necessity, I had quickly acquired the practical knowledge long ago mastered by my Ugandan counterparts. I had assimilated information about which checkpoints were staffed by Tanzanian soldiers, which by the Ugandan army, and which by the Ugandan police. The first were the safest, for the Tanzanians were professional soldiers and well disciplined. The last were to be avoided, for the police often began drinking early and, lacking a fixed schedule of bribes, often quarreled with those from whom they extorted payment. I had also learned which roads to avoid entirely, because traffic was likely to be machine-gunned by rebel forces. I had begun each day in Uganda by designing a plan of work based on the necessity of being off the road before dark, to lower the risk of being shot.

When I returned to Uganda the following spring under the auspices of the World Bank, I renewed acquaintances with my Ugandan colleagues. For them, Uganda’s return to the international community had meant renewed chances to practice their professions, as administrators, economists, or engineers. But rather than feeling exhilarated, most, I learned, were haunted by the reality that the renewed opportunities made manifest. Given the circumstances of their lives, why train? Why invest in new skills? Too often they had come to the office to find a colleague missing, or attended the funeral of a friend. On long car trips during the day, or while sharing drinks at night, they helped me to understand what it is to live in a world overrun by soldiers.

As we got to know each other, our discussion moved from professional topics to families, friends, and loved ones. I learned of the central questions many confronted in their lives: How do you teach a child to work hard, go to school, or be honest, when he may not grow up? Why shouldn’t a child be allowed to do whatever she wants? Why should anyone do without today, when there might not be a tomorrow? And I discovered that my colleagues loved their courses abroad not merely for the intellectual nourishment but also because in Stockholm or Oslo or London they need not sleep with one ear cocked for the sound of an approaching lorry full of soldiers. At this point the conversation would stop as someone imitated the distinctive sound of a certain type of vehicle, imported by the army, in deals brokered by merchants, in exchange for exports of coffee.

I had come from abroad and would leave. For my Ugandan counterparts, there could be no escape. If young, they reminded me of my students, or, if older, of myself.

Coffee Plantation, by Candido Portiniari (1935)

I later worked in Colombia, another violent country. Early in this century, thousands of Colombians died in the War of 1,000 Days; in the period of la violencia following World War II, so did more than a quarter of a million more. Conflict in Colombia centers in the rural areas, where guerrilla groups occupy armed enclaves, families fight over land rights, and political parties struggle for local domination. And yet, in the coffee zones, communities of small-scale farmers have carved out islands of peace. By organizing their communities, they have rid them of bandits. Families receive health care, children attend school, and villages celebrate weddings, saints’ days, and festivals without fear of violence.

Inspired by my Ugandan experiences, I sought to comprehend the origins of this peace, for it was peace, not violence, that now appeared problematic. I made only modest progress in explaining the peace, but I did gain a keen sense of its significance. I encountered active scholars teaching in provincial universities, located in the small cities that dot the coffee zone. I witnessed the craft and care that went into the fabrication of houses on Colombia’s coffee farms. On work days, I joined lunch-time audiences at concerts held in courtyards in the provincial towns. On weekends, I attended village festivals. In a society permeated by violence, I had learned, the night is feared; I was now reminded that in a society at peace, the night can be savored. The contrast was made vivid outside Manizales, in the center of Colombia’s coffee zone. As the sun descended, shadows rushed from the valley bottom and ascended the mountain sides—and a carpet of lights soon followed. The peasants had organized not only rural peace but also rural services, including electric power. Instead of huddling in the shadows, they gathered in the light of their homes to talk, to listen to the radio, to watch television, or to prepare the next day’s lessons.

I had left the classroom and entered the world of coffee. Upon returning to the academy, I strove to find ways to comprehend what I had seen. Listening, some of my students responded; despairing of my obtuseness, they began to teach me about life in the inner cities of my own country. Others—colleagues in the faculty, by and large—guided me to the literature on early modern Europe, when societies that are now rich and peaceful slaughtered a third or more of their populations. Still others reintroduced me to the work of Thomas Hobbes. When I reencountered the famous passage, “and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” I experienced a shock of recognition: the lines that precede it outlined the terms of reference for my mission in Uganda. We were to review trade, refurbish the university, revitalize farming, and so on down Hobbes’s list. But, as Hobbes argued and my experience confirmed, such elements of a decent life require that a basic political premise first be fulfilled: an end to the fear of violent death. That is the basic contribution of politics. Venturing into the world of coffee, I had discovered the foundations of my field.

ON FIELD WORK

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RINT scrolls by in black and white; the world rushes by in full color. We social scientists, therefore, often feel caged. Field work helps me break out of the confines of the academy, to tap the vitality of the “real” world to bring new dimensions to my research and teaching. Field work helps me to provide a perspective that is authoritative because it has been lived. Insofar as I can render texts tactile and impart to lines of argument the immediacy of life, I can better teach.

The energy flows not only from the field to the classroom but also from the classroom to the field. When ideas illuminate reality in ways that can be confirmed, something rare and powerful has taken place and we researchers experience a jolt of excitement that rekindles the life of the mind.

My research into the world of coffee sparked this sensation. The ICO possessed a bicameral legislature, with a house of producers and a house of consumers. The ICO assigned each producer a quota; before that quota could be enforced, it had first to be approved by a majority in both houses. The members’ votes were weighted, with large producers, such as Colombia, casting more votes than smaller producers, such as Uganda. The legislature met periodically, and for one term I attended its meetings. There I watched elegantly garbed, carefully coiffed, and expensively educated members of this government of coffee bargaining over quotas, with the diplomats from each producer seeking a small overall quota—the better to raise the coffee price—but larger quotas for their own nations.

In the classroom I teach game theory, a form of mathematics used to model political processes, particularly in electoral settings. When analyzing the data gathered at the ICO meetings, I saw the opportunity to test these models by seeing whether they could predict the assignment of quotas. I still recall the excitement I experienced when I discovered that the quotas calculated from these models by an exceptionally gifted graduate student, Donald Lien, actually forecast the quotas voted by the ICO.

While savoring this result, my mind returned to the sessions in London: breakfast with the United States delegation in Claridge’s, paid for by a U.S. coffee firm; cocktail parties in the American embassy, paid for by U.S. taxpayers; delegates in silk ties, tailored suits, and buffed shoes, gliding down corridors and gathered in intimate discussion. As forecast by our theories, the rules that structure the ICO had channeled these deliberations and shaped their outcome. But then my mind drifted further: What if the Uganda delegation had possessed one more vote? Returning to the equations, Lien quickly calculated that an additional vote for the Ugandan delegation would have enabled it to bargain for an increase of X tons of coffee exports (I no longer recall the exact figure). Calculating again, we figured that each additional bag that year would have been worth at least an additional $200—an amount equivalent to the average per capita income in Uganda. With that money, a coffee farmer could have purchased clothes for his children, replaced his thatched roof with metal sheeting, purchased cattle—or food for his family when drought withered the crops in the field.

The theoretical insights that I teach in the classroom had enabled me to penetrate beneath the surface of things in the world of coffee: the give-and-take in the corridors, for example. They had also empowered me to make far-ranging connections, meaningfully interrelating classrooms in Cambridge, corridors in London, and the huts of farmers in eastern Africa. Ideas that predict, penetrate, and encompass should be treasured. For academics, ideas yield joy and inspiration.

REFLECTIONS IN A CUP OF COFFEE

I

N the world of coffee, I had learned that power can enable; it makes possible the elementary decencies of life, as well as its more elevated attainments. But power can also exclude; using it, the fortunate can defend their privileges, while marginalizing the claims of others. The ultimate mark of privilege is to achieve sufficient security that one can ignore the coercion that makes such security possible.

Café Josty, Potsdamer Platz, by Paul Hoeniger (1890)

Look at the illustrations for this article. In the Hoeniger painting sit people like many of us, albeit in Edwardian garb, dallying over a cup of coffee. In the Portiniari sprawls the “real world.” The vivid contrast between labor and leisure, poverty and wealth, and the production and consumption of coffee highlights the magnitude of the gap between our daily lives and the world that surrounds us. The downcast eyes of the coffee drinkers—or the eyes they have only for each other—bespeak the way in which we avert our gaze to secure private lives, free from unsettling intrusion. The illustration suggests that power not only enables. Power also marginalizes. The rich, being powerful, can ignore the poor; the consumer, the toiler in the fields.

Research enables us to bring the world into the academy. It sharpens our perceptions, informs our understandings, and stimulates our thinking far more powerfully than most other forms of inquiry. Research also empowers us to transform others. Over a cup of coffee, I might now be able to explain to a student what has made possible this private moment of conversation: how, politically, it has been achieved, and what, politically, it signifies.