If the coffee blight had not happened Sri Lanka would have been the Brazil of Asia. At least that would have been true, in terms of coffee production. You may say that Brazil is full of barrios and is not a rich country. But it’s also a BRICS member nation, and the second largest economy in the Americas.
It’s an upper-middle income economy with the eight largest purchasing power parity in the world, so you’d have to envy Brazilians especially if you were Sri Lankan and watched the local economy implode in 2022.
If the coffee blight hadn’t hit, what’s Brazil today would have been Sri Lanka. But our coffee plantations were so badly affected in the late 19th century that some thought it was sabotage. But the colonial power at that time switched to tea. The country has become so synonymous with tea after that, it makes us seem almost churlish trying to imagine a better world if we were the kings of coffee.
But it’s almost never too late to go back to coffee either. In terms of global revenue generation coffee income is over $200 billion per year while tea lags behind at a relatively minor $122 billion on the same measuring scale. Tea is not as addictive as coffee.
That way it can be said that selling coffee is a tiny bit akin to selling alcohol. But the barons who make billions from coffee in Brazil don’t seem to care and neither do the various coffee aficionados who have made coffee drinking an exacting cultural pursuit that borders on the snobbish.
DISRUPTION
But these cultural contrasts apart — tea drinking is a more sedate pastime — its worth considering how much the coffee blight cost us.
It’s true that the rust fungus that caused the coffee crop failures in Sri Lanka in the 19th century were not confined to this part of the world. Entire coffee plantations from the Americas to Asia were ravaged by the blight. However, coffee rust didn’t threaten Brazilian coffee plantations until a couple of years back, and by this time as everyone knows, Sri Lanka’s powerhouse coffee industry of the 1800s had been long dead.
But today it makes sense to not merely concentrate on what might have been, but to replicate that 19th century powerhouse. Coffee culture today is driving an unbelievable demand for coffee and people are deluding themselves into thinking that it’s the esoterica and the snob value of coffee culture that’s driving global demand.
But it’s the addictive properties of the beverage that’s its main commercial driver, and it’s why perhaps those who without much thought decided to replace the coffee power house with tea, should perhaps have been far more circumspect.
However, to put things in perspective, it’s the powerful global coffee conglomerates that make the billions out of the coffee industry and not the poor growers in countries such as Ethiopia. These coffee cultivators make next to nothing for their crop of black gold that’s traded by the companies that control the global coffee industry.
If Sri Lanka was in the coffee industry however, chances are that the country would have been able to command competitive prices for crops that would have made coffee the country’s number one export. We did it with tea and Sri Lankan companies held their own in the international tea markets which makes it apparent that we could do the same with coffee.
Coffee is a much more sustainable crop than tea, and could be grown in large quantities without much disruption of existing plantations and habitats. An American by the name of Lawrence Goldberg tried it in Sri Lanka recently and carried it off to an extent.
Those Englishmen whose Ceylon coffee plantations were ravaged by the rust fungus in the late 1800s were apparently driven to suicide. If they were reincarnated no doubt they would be driven to suicide again considering how popular coffee has become in Colombo and the rest of the country and the region. Globally of course coffee sales have gone through the roof.
Sri Lanka’s indigenous economy was on the other hand disrupted due to tea plantations and people were uprooted from their traditional lands for the colonisers to begin their experiments with the monoculture of tea.
But this is reality, and all that’s being stated in this article is that if tea is now seen as a necessary evil that was bequeathed as a result of colonial entrepreneurship, it would have been better if we had coffee instead.
Brazil replaced its sugar exports — sugar was the number one export commodity in the country once upon a time — with coffee. Is it too late then for Sri Lanka to transition or rather to reverse-transition from tea to coffee?
Perhaps what could be done with a little bit of ingenuity and a great deal of hard work, is to supplant tea production with a robust coffee industry and this is not to pun on a popular strain of coffee that threatens the popularity of the traditional Arabica brews. Indeed Robusta has replaced Arabica as the coffee of choice among some coffee drinkers searching for a quick caffeine fix.
Even though the tea leaf contains more caffeine than the coffee, tea is drunk in far more diluted form than coffee and therefore there is far less caffeine in a cuppa than in a shot of espresso.
It explains why drinkers don’t get the caffeine fix they get with coffee in tea, and why the coffee blight made us miss out on being able to cash in on a brew that just had to become far more popular as time went by due to its relatively more potent addictive properties.
Coffee fixes and serious coffee addictions may not be healthy at all to put it mildly, but then we are not in the business of wellness but rather in the business of making money out of a crop.
The British weren’t thinking of wellness when they introduced tea instead of coffee. They simply were at their wits end because the rust fungus was ruthless and they were suicidal as a result as their investment on the crop went to waste. Many owners of Ceylonese coffee plantations did commit suicide.
DESTINED
The one drink with the more addictive properties has, at least revenue-wise, hands down won the beverages race over tea, but if we switch back to coffee soon, we may be re-blighted as well. Seriously, what if the coffee blight which threatened coffee plantations severely as recently as in 2021 in Brazil, once more threatens to wipe out the new Sri Lankan plantations if we decide to switch back?
The problem is coffee though a much more sustainable crop is always more susceptible than tea to rust disease and other similar viral or fungal contagions.
Luck plays a far greater part than it should in these matters and Sri Lanka was destined to stick with the non-addictive tea because our coffee powerhouse was blighted. But can we put it down to mere kismet? Maybe we are the country that is destined to eventually master being commercially successful with both crops?
There is definitely a resurgence of coffee in terms of drinkers falling in love with specialty coffees and indulging in a bit of harmless coffee snobbery as well. But as far as taking to growing the crop and creating our own specialty varieties, we have been only doing it in fits and starts, and there is a long way to go.
The writer is not a tea or coffee expert and possible mistakes in the above content if any are unintentional, and he asks to be forgiven.
But suffice to say in general that the coffee blight was costlier for Sri Lanka than the general record would have it. But there is always a second chance, and it would be perfect if Sri Lanka coffee some day in the near future comes to be as well known globally as Ceylon tea.
