From Chains to Supply Chains

Thank the Farmers

I love coffee. Most people who know me know this about me.

I have a lot of fun with coffee and the many ways it intersects with geography and popular culture. I am, in fact, enjoying my umpteenth cup of fine coffee of the day, even as I write this.

But as most people who know me realize, my love of coffee is exceeded by my love of the people who produce it and the lands from which the best coffee is grown. I end almost every coffee story with the hashtag #thankthefarmers for that reason.

It is good to remember that however much fun we can have with coffee and however much we can appreciate the social and environmental benefits of coffee that is grown carefully and traded fairly, coffee can also be a very serious matter indeed.

A reminder come from a March 2016 Guardian article that has been sitting on my desktop since someone shared it with me a couple of months ago. For all this time, I have not know quite what to do with Nestlé admits slave labour risk on Brazil coffee plantations, but I knew I could not let it go until I found a way to share it and to connect it with my other work on coffee.

As I look at the title carefully, I notice two small things. Where The Guardian uses "slave labour risk" a U.S.-based paper would use "slave-labor risk." Spelling and punctuation aside, the use of the word "risk" is itself interesting. From the standpoint of a major corporation, the possibility that slavery was involved in its operations is a risk to be managed like any other, such as weather or the fluctuation of currency markets.

The article mentions two of the very biggest such corporations in the $77-billion coffee market, which were known at the time it was published as Nestlé and Jacobs Douwe Egberts. The latter is now known as JAB, which includes those companies as well as Keurig (a little Boston-based company whose convenient brewer was purchased by the erstwhile Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and eventually swallowed Green Mountain and much of the industry). Together they sell about 40 percent of all of the coffee that is sold on the planet. For food companies operating at this scale, the food and the lands and people from which the product comes are such abstractions that even fundamental questions such as slavery and freedom become mere columns in a spreadsheet.

If slavery -- or any other inconvenient truth -- turns out to be contributing to the bottom line, the equivalent of a politician's plausible deniability provides a convenient fig leaf to cover the original sin of greed. In coffee, that fig leaf is in the form of a supply chain that is deliberately blurry in appearance. Someone growing $5,000 worth of coffee in a year cannot bring it to the gates of Nestlé or JAB -- there are in fact no such gates. The small farmer sells to middlemen (always men, and known in Latin America as coyotes) who consolidate purchases for the convenience of large processors ; it turns out that even a large plantation can benefit from selling coffee through brokers who can hide their practices.

Federal auditor investigating claims of human-rights abuses on a coffee farm in Brazil.
Photo: Lilo Clareto/DanWatch via The Guardian

When price is the main competitive factor, the pressure to force prices down will stop at nothing, not even the use of bonded labor. When citizens -- sometimes thought of only as consumers -- push back, the race to the bottom involves deceit, even self-deceit. Kate Hodal's excellent reporting on this complicated matter could be read by some as Nestlé and JAB being victimized by bad actors in a complicated network of suppliers. Stories like this -- which have parallels in the U.S. chicken industry and throughout food systems globally -- can also be read as evidence that more vigilance and accountability is necessary.

Moreover, it is a reminder that education about coffee in particular and food in general should continue to begin and end with considerations of human rights.

Afghanistan in the Long Shadow of Benghazi

Beginning with Ronald Reagan embraced the Mujahideen in the 1980s as part of his multi-pronged effort to topple the already-teetering Soviet empire, tactics in Afghanistan have been unable to redeem strategies that landed the United States there in the first place.  As many of us suggested at the time -- and were dismissed as not sufficiently rabid against the USSR -- Afghanistan has never been a good place to invade. Obviously.

We are there now, however, in a long occupation. As I write this Veteran's Day, I am saddened by how much has been sacrificed by our (mostly young) men and women in uniform, many of whom I have known, and some of whom never came home.

I am also mindful of those out of uniform -- both Afghan citizens who want a normal life and our own men and women who serve in diplomatic and development roles. According to Tom Bowman's recent reporting, they are essentially confined to barracks.


The current administration came to office in part on the basis of mischaracterizing the terrible events in Benghazi, Libya, in which four U.S. diplomats and eleven (always forgotten) Libyan colleagues were killed. That terrible event was reduced to a couple of soundbites and hashtags as it was used for political purposes, mainly by people who cared not one whit about the work of the diplomats who perished. For of course, it was many of those same people who had failed adequately to fund diplomats in general and diplomatic security in general.

Photo: S.K. Vemmer, U.S. Department of State, from Louisa Bargaron's Keeping America Safe: Development's Role in National Security

Remarkably, diplomats and their colleagues in social and economic development remain committed to the improvement of U.S. relations with Afghanistan and the well-being of its people. They are in the country right now, ready to serve and having at least some good ideas of how to do it.

The administration to which they report, however, is paralyzed by its own rhetorical excesses. Those who stand ready to serve in Afghanistan are thus virtual prisoners of an overly cautious security posture that does not allow them to work freely -- even within the boundaries of secure areas, according to Bowman's reporting.

Aid and diplomacy will not make Afghanistan a safe and prosperous place in the near term -- nothing is going to do that. But hunkering down is not a viable option. The current non-strategy serves nobody well by this -- not the civilians and diplomats, nor the soldiers and marines on whom they rely.

Lagniappe

It is becoming apparent that the marginalization of diplomats in Afghanistan may be only the starkest example of a rapidly-emerging process of hollowing out the U.S. diplomatic corps worldwide. According to recent -- and thorough -- reporting by the Washington Post, Secretary of State Tillerson is pushing hundreds of career diplomats out of their posts, replacing very few of them.

Library Movie; Coffee Movie

Whenever my favorite librarian is reading a book, she keeps sticky notes nearby to mark any passage that mentions libraries. Even a single mention will get the book reviewed on her "Library" Books blog, a sort of metablog about the representation of libraries in written works. (She uses a digital equivalent of the sticky-note process for e-books.)

When we are reading a book together, I ask her to do the same for me, writing the letter "J" on the notes she attaches to passages that interest me as a geographer, coffee maven, or both. As she adds library references to her blog posts, she removes her notes, and I follow up, usually with a shorter post either on this blog or on social media (my "microblogs"). Looking at the drafts folder of this blog, I see that I am half a year behind her very important Timbuktu post. Before I catch up there, though, I need to make a few notes about another book we read together recently, and about which she wrote more extensively -- excerpts from 25 years of the personal diaries of the inimitable David Sedaris.

Selected from thousands of pages of his wry observations of the world from the point of view of a struggling (and later not-so-struggling) artist, we could hear his voice as we read each page of Theft by Finding. Although coffee shops, bad coffee, and geography permeate the work, I noted just three passages.

On October 17, 1986, he describes a small encounter in a Chicago coffee shop -- where he spends much of his time -- that also involves a library book:

"Tonight at the coffee shop a telephone number fell out of my library book and a man pointed it out to me. It was not an important number, but I pretended that this guy had saved my life. He did not seem to care."

I could almost hear the little music NPR puts behind his voice when he makes this kind of deadpan comment.

We were reading the book aloud (by which I usually mean, Pam was reading it to me), and so exclaimed in turn, "Coffee movie!" and "Library movie!" Even though it is not a movie. This is what our home life is like.

On December 21, 1989, also in Chicago, he describes going out with his friend Ben and Ben's mother, who was marking the tenth anniversary of her divorce.

"At first she thought she'd order the pancakes and have a beer to go with them. Then she changed her mind and went with the bacon cheeseburger, deciding that instead of the beer she'd have coffee."

I have to admire the unconventional beverage pairings. And Sedaris had to admire that she worked at B. Dalton, which is where Pam worked when we started dating, not long before this entry, but far away in Baltimore.

Much later, on January 7, 2002, he writes in Paris, describing a coffee-related crisis during a rather bleak winter day there:

"Every day feels the same, in part because every day looks the same. Again yesterday it was cold and cloudy, the sky the flat gray color of a nickel. We'd planned to go to Normandy but it turns out the agency in Argentan has no more rental cars. Going without one means that Hugh will spend the entire week in a sour mood, threatening to sell the house and move back to New York. We'd both looked forward to getting away, but I'm definitely handling the disappointment better than he is. I just watched as he poured an entire bag of coffee into the stovetop espresso machine. Grounds spilled onto the counter and when I asked what he was doing, he brushed them onto the floor, saying flatly, 'Making coffee.'"

That was a passage we had read just before our most recent encounter, in the book-signing line after his uproarious appearance at the Zeiterion Theater. "Have we met?" he asked, recognizing us as the groupies we have begun. We keep coming back, because he is as kind in person as he is acerbic on stage and on the page.

He is also prolific -- we look forward to many more of his diaries going to press in the future.

Fires of the Future Are Here

Essential reading for the next century of fires.

The relationships between humans and forest fires are becoming increasingly complicated and harrowing. I was fortunate to begin learning about some of the counterintuitive parts of this relationship -- most notably that suppressing fires eventually makes them more likely -- from an excellent landscape ecologist with whom I studied briefly just a year after the famous Yellowstone fires. Since then, I have been able to draw on collaborations with forest ecologists and on David Foster's excellent text Thoreau's Country as I explore this increasingly important topic with students. I have even had the good fortune of working with a couple of students with forest-fire expertise.

This has all been very much on my mind, as my Land Protection class once again coincides with a particularly damaging fire season in the western United States. I was therefore very interested to hear a recent Living Lab Radio interview with Firestorm author Edward Struzik. He had a wide-ranging discussion of forest fires, including the both causes and effects related to climate change with Heather Goldstone (sometime visitor to our campus) and reporter Elsa Partan.

The discussion is both a clear summary of some of the ecology I already understood and a source of several insights that were new to me. One of these is the odd distinction we make between fire and other kinds of disaster, in terms of what we expect of emergency responders. In reality, Struzik suggests, we should no more expect firefighters to stop wildfires than we should expect them to stop a hurricane. The threat looks like the sort of thing firefighters are trained and equipped to combat, but the difference in scale is so vast that it is a difference in kind.

On the same day I heard Struzik's interview, NPR's Morning Edition offered a short version in its story: Want Less Wildfire? Prescribe More Fire, Ecologists Say.

This blog includes several other posts on the topic for those who wish to learn more: Wild Fire Anniversary (2010), Hot or Not (2012), Frontier on Fire (2015), Thoreau at 200 (2017), 

Better Tequila for a Better Planet

Photo: Merlin Tuttle/Bat Conservation International
(and an exquisite photo it is!)

I spend much of my time using coffee to teach geography, and geography to teach coffee. I am happy to do the same with tea and chocolate, and though I know relatively little, I sometimes take the same approach with wine.

Today, it is tequila's turn. As funny as it might sound at first, there are very serious connections to be made between the health of bat populations and the practices of those who grow agave for tequila and its earthier cousin, mezcal. We first learned of the problem 25 years ago while living in Tucson, near the northern limits of agave. Just in time for Halloween, NPR reporter Neda Ulaby explains the problem that greater demand is placing on a "Once Boo-tiful Relationship."

Luther Geographies

My first academic dinner was on the 10th day of a November. It was in a restaurant near our undergraduate campus that I had previously thought of as a bar that was just a bit nicer than our usual dives. A guest speaker had come to our class on the philosophy of religion (I had taken several classes and even completed an internship in this area), and our professor had taken the speaker and just a couple of students out to dinner afterwards.

Near the end of the meal, a couple of the servers came out with a cake. It might have had five candles, and I am pretty sure they were trying to sing. They faltered a bit as they addressed "Dr. Luther" and looked back and forth at each of the people at the table who seemed old enough to be doctors, none of whom were responding.

It turns out that our Dr. Benson was a bit of a joker, and a bigger devotee of Martin Luther than I had realized. I knew Dr. Benson was a protestant, but I did not know that he was such a protestant. I also did not realize that Martin Luther would have been 500 years old on that day. (Though I must say, I think Dr. Benson might have been off by a year or two.) The cake was to celebrate the founder of the protestant reformation.

Thirty-some years out of college, we now have the quincentennial of that act of rebellion: Martin Luther, a youngish monk, nailing his 95 theses to the door of the cathedral. Or at least mailing a letter that gets remembered that way. All of this came to mind as I listened to Tom Gjelten's report on that half-millenium anniversary, the causes of the rift, and recent efforts toward reconciliation between those long-divided factions.

Portrait by Lucas Cranach

The story connects in three small ways to my work as a geographer. First, in Luther's time the political power of the church was only just beginning to be challenged. During his childhood, for example, that Pope Alexander VI put the line on the map that divided what was to be the Americas (and much of the rest of the world, eventually) between Spain and Portugal. The Treaty of Tordesillas was audacious, to put things mildly, but it shaped Latin America, which was to become my major area of study.

My first undergraduate major had been the German language, and in one of my geography classes I wrote a research paper about the language. Specifically, I had noticed that I could read Martin Luther's translation of the Bible (Die Bibel) more easily than I could a modern German translation, such as The Good News Bible (Der Guter Nachricht).

In writing the term paper for the only course I took on European geography, I learned that Luther himself had helped to shape the language. Of the many dialects that were spoken during his lifetime, his own dialect became dominant in the written form of the language, precisely because he had used it in his Bible. And because keeping the Bible out of the hands of ordinary Christians had been one of his 95 complaints, the movement he launched ensured that the written version of his dialect would become the standard over a much broader area than the spoken version had been. And thus five centuries later it is what gets taught to foreign students of the language.

The final connection between Luther and my work as a geographer is in the form of an organization that bears his name. Lutheran World Relief is a church-affiliated agency that provides both short-term aid and long-term development assistance to communities throughout the world. Some of that work has involved promoting the fair-trade model for coffee growers, and building on that model. When I started looking for a place to take students to learn about coffee, I was introduced to LWR staff members in Nicaragua who were helping coffee growers to establish a home-based agroecotourism enterprise in La Corona, Matagalpa -- a small community that would become my home away from home each winter.

Lagniappes

When making the morning coffee, I am often able to catch the 9-minute BBC program Witness, which airs on WBUR in Boston each morning at 4:50. The premise is that unique insight on historical events is provided by conversation with people who were witness to those events. Sometimes this is done with a twist, by consulting historians -- in this case Lyndal Roper -- and original documents. The Martin Luther's 95 Theses installment includes a good description of why people were so upset about indulgences, and how Luther's associates used the printed word to give Luther a far greater impact than otherwise he would have had.

Added November 5: Reformation quincentennial coverage continues; just yesterday I heard an interview on BBC with linguist Ruth Sanders, whose German: Biography of a Language includes the Luther Bible I mention above as a key turning point in the development of the language. It is almost as if she read that paper I wrote as a college student! As someone who used to speak the language fluently, I look forward to reading the rest of the story of its origins.

Siding with Banksters

Today it was reported that Vice President Pence "had to" break a tie in the Senate. Years after financial companies drove a thriving U.S. economy into the proverbial ditch, rules were about to take effect that would allow citizens to file class-action lawsuits against financier malfeasance.

Far from serving the public good, V.P. Pence put his thumb on the scale of justice, in favor of the unjust. (Sorry for the mixed metaphors.)

The action, of course, brings Professor Woodie Guthrie's famous words to mind. To an ordinary person, a bank is at least as dangerous as a bank robber.

Advancing Science on Retreating Glaciers

This is a critical time for the world's retreating glaciers. In fact, it could be said that the most critical time -- when their retreat could have been arrested -- has already passed. Still, the status of glaciers are among the strongest indicators of climate change, and their loss is among its most dangerous consequences.

First, their role as indicators. Glaciers are long-term accumulations of frozen water (ice and snow), usually at high elevation. During particularly cold periods in the Pleistocene, continental glaciers were found at sea level, but in the Holocene epoch, glaciers have been strictly alpine. Wherever they are found, they represent a balance between a colder zone of accumulation -- in which more snow falls during a year than melts -- and a warmer zone of ablation, in which the opposite occurs.

The exact position of the nose of the glacier will fluctuate seasonally and over time, as this balance shifts. When the position of the nose at a given time of year is consistently moving upslope, the glacier is said to be retreating, indicating a steady warming. We would know that the planet is warming without these indicators, but the retreat of glaciers from Glacier National Monument to Kilimanjaro and Tibet to Cochabamba is evidence that one has to work pretty hard to ignore. (For those unfamiliar with Cochabamba, please see my posts Cochabamba Continued (2012), The Most Important Town in the Americas (2013), and Snowboarders Rescue Our Climate (2016 student guest blog).

It was in this context that I listened to Rob Schmitz' cogent reporting on the work of Chinese climate scientists who are documenting the retreat of the thousands of glaciers in that country. One of the excuses for the U.S. refusal to participate in the Kyoto Protocol on climate change was that it did not require enough of China and other rapidly developing countries. Ironically, just as China has caught up to the United States as a contributor to the problem of climate change, it is stepping up to support the Paris Accord, even as the U.S. retreats.

Climograph of Ürümqi from Climate-Data.org
This city is mentioned in the radio report above; the climate
on the glaciers themselves would not be so balmy.

In Impossible to Save, Schmitz accompanies scientists who know that the glaciers they study will not stop retreating; they hope, however, that their work will encourage changes that will slow down the pace of change. In this brief and well-organized report, they clearly describe not only the evidence of shrinkage but also its implications. Humans rely on glaciers in ways that few outside of alpine areas understand. They are the reservoirs that supply water and irrigate crops for many millions of people.

I have become very interested in glaciers as I teach about the geographies of coffee and tea, because both crops are threatened in some areas by the loss of glaciers. This was, in fact, to have been the subject of a course that I offered in partnership with a colleague who researches glacial retreat in Peru. Dr. Rob Hellström and I planned Coffee and Climate Change in Peru as a field course that would visit his research stations and communities of coffee farmers who are affected by many aspects of climate change. We did not enroll quite enough students to carry out the course, but we will try again to offer it in the near future.

Periglacial research station in Peru.
Photo: Dr. Rob Hellström

Texas Southmost Reporter

Kayla America Fuentes interviewing Cuban Alfredo "Rusty" Monsees at his home on the eponymous road in Brownsville Photo: Debbie Nathan.

When I was teaching at UTB-Texas Southmost College (now UT-RGV) , some of my students walked to class directly from their homes in Mexico. The fellow in this story grew up -- and continues to live -- in the tiny patch of Texas even farther south than THAT.

Kayla America Fuentes is a local teenager heard a lot of stories about him, and decided to do an interview. The result is an article whose unconventional title mentions the subject, the reporter, and the motivation for the reporting itself. The Old Man Who Calls Border Patrol on Immigrants, and the Teen Girl Who Asked Him Why shows that she is off to a great start as a journalist. She already has the curiosity, tenacity, and writing skills of a seasoned reporter.

Rather than try to summarize her work or comment on its implications, I encourage readers to read the article to the end. It gives us plenty to think about.



Lagniappe

The map shows places named for two people mentioned in the story -- Mr. Monsees himself and Pancho Villa.

Professional Regions

"Not all who wander are lost"
~~ J.R.R. Tolkien, linguist, author, and honorary geographer

I have often said that if you enjoy being lost, you should travel with geographers. It works especially well if we are in a van. Last year four of us -- with three GPS units -- got lost going to a school we had been to before. But we learned so much local geography along the way, so we considered it a win.

It should come as no surprise, then, that geographers are not to be trusted with the drawing of regional boundaries. The American Association of Geographers (née Association of American Geographers) boast nine regional divisions, shown here:

Click to enlarge

Keeping in mind that regions are to geography as gravity is to physics: understanding regions is what we do, it is fascinating that this is what we have come up with.

I have been in all of nine of these regions, and have taught or studied geography in five of them. I first noticed something odd the first time I was involved in hosting one of the regional meetings. Professor George Strait had something to say about this --

That's right: I was leading field trips in the Arizona desert for a meeting of the Pacific Coast geographers. The excuse, I heard, was that two of the professors in my Tucson department enjoyed going to meetings in Hawaii as often as they could. I guess their pals in Nevada and Idaho felt the same way.

But that is not nearly all. From Arizona, I moved to Texas (about 100 miles south of George Strait's ranch, btw), where I attended a meeting of the Southwest AAG. The inclusion of Texas made sense, and I had already given up on Arizona, but Arkansas and Louisiana? I don't think so.

Some of the regions do make sense: Great Plains/Rocky Mountains is not a succinct name, but anybody who sees the name would know what states are included. Similarly, the subdivision of the former Great Lakes division makes sense, because there are so very many geography departments there. I am pretty sure there are at least two places to get a Ph.D. in geography in each state within each region. So the split makes sense, and although "Midwest" would have been a more conventional choice for a name, "Lakes" sounds nice, and it would have been quite messy to have "West Midwest" and "East Midwest." So we geographers did well with the middle of the country.

Back to the oddities, proceeding counterclockwise. At first glance, the Southeast makes sense, until we realize that it includes West Virginia, a state formed in 1863 precisely to get some parts of Virginia out of the south. We made the big time with this -- Wikipedia points out that AAG and the Census Bureau classify West Virginia this way, in its discussion of all the regions to which this state is sometimes assigned.

Next comes the Middle Atlantic division, which includes the place where I became a geographer (UMBC in Catonsville) and where I became a person (the erstwhile Columbia Hospital for Women in D.C.) There is nothing really wrong with this region -- it is in the middle of the Atlantic coast of the U.S. But it seems rather small -- just a state plus a city that used to be part of the very same state. It is a maritime state, but not so much on the Atlantic side. It has about 150 miles of Chesapeake Bay coastline, but only 31 miles on the Atlantic Ocean.

Next come the Middle States, crammed almost as far into the northeast corner as states can be, and actually bordering Canada!

Finally, our own NESTVAL -- both a division of the AAG and a separate, older society of its own: The New England and St. Lawrence Valley Geographical Society (whose annual meeting I am missing this weekend, for only the second time in 20 years). "Where is the St. Lawrence Valley?" a student asked me yesterday. "Not on this map," I replied.

I was once the newsletter editor for NESTVAL, a position for which I volunteered because I was pretty good at putting together a decent-looking publication. I am not, however, any good at keeping track of membership lists in ambiguous circumstances, and so I failed spectacularly at the newsletter mailing list. Members of the other 8 divisions are simply the AAG members with mailing addresses in those divisional boundaries. NESTVAL membership also includes those who are AAG or CAC-ACG with addresses in certain parts of Canada, plus anybody who simply decides to show up and pay NESTVAL dues. So although NESTVAL looks like an area on the map of the United States shown above, it is much more like a state of mind.

So anybody needing to have regions drawn, feel free to call on us professionals!

Alternatives

One fellow geographer who read this decided to look for other regional schemes. He was pleased to find that the regions used for reporting purposes in the National Climate Assessment (which as of this posting is still available to the public, despite the current project of silencing government scientists -- but that is a subject for another post) follows a pattern more familiar to the general public.

Click to enlarge

Another geographer recently shared this map of the United States, if it might look if a professional design team had been consulted.

Click to enlarge

Lagniappe

Regionalization is an equally fraught term as it applies to municipal government in Massachusetts -- home to 351 cities and towns, with an unknown number of school districts!