From Goats to Globalization: The Stories of the Coffee and Tea Industries

- by Keith Carey

Coffee, today's second most traded commodity, was discovered by goats! Let us go back to Ethiopia over 1,000 years ago. According to legend, Kaldi, a goat herder, noticed his livestock was a little more exuberant after chewing on some unknown red berries. They were bleating loudly and jumping off of rocks! Kaldi pocketed some of the berries, and took them to the local monastery. Some versions of the legend have the monastery as Muslim, others have it as Orthodox Christian. One version of the story has the head monk boiling the red berries and drinking the new concoction. Another version has him shouting, "devil's work!" and throwing the berries into the fire. The aroma of roasting coffee beans attracted the other monks and caused them to investigate. After drinking the brew resulting from the ground and boiled beans, the monks found they could stay up for evening devotions more easily. One wonders if the Ethiopians are better with blarney than the Irish!

Tea had a more dignified discovery, according to one web site. According to one story, the discoverer was an emperor, not a goat. It was 2,700 BC, and Emperor Shen had just finished a large meal. He was relaxing in his garden with a cup of boiled water when some leaves fell into the cup and gave the water a pleasant taste. A Chinese tradition was born. Tea remained primarily a Chinese drink for many centuries. Curiously, the Chinese didn't try to market their tea during this time. Instead, it was Great Britain's East India Company that began to market its product after setting up tea plantations in Assam, northeast India in 1835. By the 1880s, there were 600 tea plantations in India, where Indian nationals worked in slave-like conditions. The tea industry expanded to Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka), where Thomas Twining and Thomas Lipton established their commercial empires.

In late colonial days, the British tried to impose a tea tax on their American colonists in Boston. The Americans were in no mood to comply, and they dumped the tea into the harbor. This "Boston Tea Party" was planned by rebellious colonists in Boston's Green Dragon Coffeehouse. Coffee became the American patriot's drink.

Arabs, Coffee, Islam, and Controversy
The British Empire didn't get into the coffee trade until much later. The coffee trade was actually developed by Arab Muslims. From Ethiopia, which was a rather isolated part of the world, coffee beans made their way north to nearby Yemen. Now that it was in the hands of the powerful Arab Muslims, coffee became an important trade item.

But first it had to pass the Islamic religious test. Some Muslim teachers frowned on drinking coffee, especially when people began to gather in coffeehouses instead of praying. But who could argue with Mohammed, the founder of Islam, who was quoted as saying that with the use of coffee he could "…unhorse 40 men and possess 40 women." And the Sufi monks found it handy when they had all night prayer vigils. Coffee quickly became a popular everyday beverage in the Arab world.

Arab traders guarded their exclusive commodity well. Plots were guarded, and no coffee bean that had a chance to germinate was allowed out of the Arab traders' grasp. Coffee was traded within the Muslim world of the Persians and the Turks. Dervishes in Turkey whirled more vigorously under the influence of the caffeinated brew.

But all good monopolies have to come to an end. In the early 1600s a Muslim pilgrim successfully smuggled a coffee plant to Mysore, India, and the industry expanded to South Asia.

Europeans Get In On the Fun In the 1600s
The 17th Century was the time when coffee made its debut in Christian Europe. Venetian traders first presented coffee to Europe in 1615. Though warned that coffee could be a destructive force in the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Clement VIII decided to find out for himself by sampling the brown liquid. He enjoyed it so much that he christened it a "truly Christian beverage."

A Turkish diplomat brought coffee beans as a gift to French leaders, touching off a coffee craze in France. Voltaire was rumored to have drank 50 cups of coffee a day!

Fashionable people, not only in Paris, but also Vienna and London, began coffeehouses. Intellectuals and businessmen gravitated to these places to share ideas and conduct business deals just as they do today. By the 1700s, London had over 1,000 coffeehouses. But in this city, people from all walks of life were part of the coffee scene. Many new ideas and businesses were born. Lloyd's of London, the Stock Exchange, the Bankers Clearinghouse, and the first London tabloids all began around cups of brown brew.

It was those enterprising Dutch traders who first took coffee to the New World. A young naval officer named Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu managed to keep a coffee plant alive until they docked at Martinique. Within 50 years, there were more than 18 million coffee trees growing on this island. These were the progenitors of most of the coffee plants grown in Central and South America today.

The Dutch, who controlled much of the world's shipping at that time, soon managed to plant coffee beans on the Indonesian island of Java. From there, the Dutch, who were expanding their empire in this region, managed to begin to grow coffee in Sulawesi and Sumatra, two of today's finest coffee growing islands.

It took the British Empire until 1878 to bring coffee cultivation back to their East African roots. They began to cultivate coffee trees in Kenya, just south of Ethiopia. Today coffee is a key industry in the nation states of Kenya and Ethiopia. Twelve million of Ethiopia's 78 million people are dependent on the coffee industry, according to "Seleamta," the In-Flight Magazine of Ethiopian Airlines.

Millions are involved with the coffee and tea industries worldwide. Tea is mainly cultivated in China (12 percent), India (37 percent), and Sri Lanka (nine percent). Coffee plantations are located in much of Latin America, East Africa, Indonesia, and the nations of Southeast Asia. Many of the people involved with these industries are from unreached people groups. A couple of years ago, world coffee prices dropped, causing poverty to many already cash-strapped farmers in the world's coffee belt. The prices are bouncing back, but not before many farmers had to give up their livelihoods in places like Vietnam.

What does the future hold for the coffee and tea industries? The power of former colonial empires is being transferred to international corporations, as globalized businesses gain more control. Most of the people who control these businesses are from evangelized countries. Will they use their power to allow the gospel to go forth, or will they simply use their power to make profit?