From Sea to Shining Sea: Coffee’s Transport and Expanding Our Definition of “the Middle People” | 25, Issue 17
Efforts to make coffee’s supply chain more sustainable have resulted in more awareness of the labor it takes to produce coffee, but some parts of the chain remain overlooked.
ERIKA KOSS sheds light on the vital human labor that makes it possible for farmers to be paid and for baristas to serve coffee.
You don’t have to go far these days to stumble upon a news story about something going wrong with some supply chain, somewhere. Between COVID-19’s port closures, the unfortunate lodging of the ship Ever Given in the Suez Canal, and a dwindling—but essential—workforce, supply chains for everything from computer chips to car parts (and, of course, coffee) are experiencing delays and complications like never before. Only the most optimistic of supply chain analysts are estimating this will resolve as soon as 2024.
If the Coffee Systems Map offers a glimpse into the complexity of a single supply chain, a map articulating the broader infrastructure underpinning our ability to globally move goods would have so many dense connections, writ on such an incomprehensibly large scale, that it might look opaque at a distance. Without this infrastructure—human, container, machine—our current global economic paradigm can’t function.
One of the things that struck me, over the course of working with Erika Koss on her feature, is how unprepared we still are, even with the recent chaos, to fully understand and address the impact of our newfound reliance on just-in-time supply chains. The creation of the intermodal shipping container in the 1960s has led to ever-larger ships (with greater environmental impact) and ever-leaner operations (with significant social impact) designed to maximize profit. Of course, as COVID-19 drew the spotlight to this underlying structure, we can now begin to see how the practices underpinning the colossal shipping industry are unsustainable in more ways than one—but there’s a long and bumpy road ahead to change them.
“Where once supply chain management was mostly about cutting costs,” wrote Brooke Masters for the Financial Times in late January 2022, “many CEOs want help balancing the competing demands of improving resilience, cutting carbon emissions, and keeping costs down.”[1] It’s the triple constraint (“good, fast, cheap—pick two!”) on a much larger scale, overlaid across a huge, fragile system that functions best only when it can accurately predict the needs of the future. The difficulty in achieving this delicate balance is, in some ways, what landed us with our current situation: a record low in shipbuilding orders, driven by uncertainty around emissions regulation, coincided with record demand for goods during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the next few pages, Erika refocuses our attention on “the middle people” in coffee’s supply chain, walking their own, narrow tightrope in balancing the needs and wants of the specialty coffee industry within the limitations of these existing global structures. As we continue to examine how, when, and where value is captured and distributed throughout our own complex system, Erika’s writing serves as a timely reminder of just how many hands are required to ensure there’s coffee in your cup—and why it’s important to question simple stories.
Jenn Rugolo
Editor, 25
Before I started working as a barista in southern California in 1996, I’d spent a summer in Kenya and Uganda. During those years in the mid-1990s, I never imagined that hundreds of people made it possible for me to be a barista in the first place.
As I’d cut the top layer of the fifty-pound silver bags of freshly roasted coffee from Indonesia, Mexico, and Kenya to pour them into bins, I relished the smell of earthy, nutty, or bright fragrances, exuding even from the oils. Rare were the bags in the 1990s that listed a farmer’s or cooperative’s name—and although hundreds of human hands had touched these coffees on their way from seed to our San Diego café, we were only just beginning to think about origin countries, let alone terroir and farmers’ rights. To most North American coffee drinkers in those days, farmers were invisible and baristas were anonymous. Now there is an astonishing amount of effort in the world of specialty coffee to rectify this, including global initiatives, dozens of coffee competitions, and better story-telling efforts on websites or coffee bags.
Still, the people who handle the logistics of moving coffee from port to port remain obscured. Seldom are the articles or lectures focused on exporters and importers, despite our reliance upon them for the very bean we all cherish. Increasingly referred to as “middlemen” throughout the early 2000s with the implication that they should be cut out or off, narratives suggested that their removal would unilaterally lead to better wages to farmers. But at best, those in the middle perform essential labor in coffee that makes it, quite literally, possible both for those at the farm level and those in cafés to get paid. Few of us who work in coffee could do so if it were not for all the human hands involved in moving coffee from origin country to coffee-drinking country: importers, exporters, and logistics personnel, those who work in transportation, warehouses, customs, and so much more. Yet too often their roles, the value they add, and their names, remain underappreciated.
Such questions of value—who creates it, who captures it—are not new, and to understand today’s trading dynamics and why so much of this work is anonymous, it helps to look back to coffee’s long history for context.
A Brief History of Trading Coffee
Coffee’s original home is the Kaffa region in the montane forests of southwestern Ethiopia, but its precise movement out of Ethiopia remains mysterious. Still, as Majka Burhardt summarizes, historians concur that before the sixth century, "the bean had its first opportunity to be traded over the eighty-kilometer stretch of Red Sea to Yemen."[2] Until then, the drink “coffea” was mostly unknown in Europe,[3] but “by the 1500s, as demand surged, cultivation was in full swing in Yemen.”[4] In 1615, as Europe’s awareness of and desire for coffee grew, trading began to flourish, with coffee being exported out of Ethiopia to the world on camels or goats, on merchant vessels and pirate ships, and later on trucks, trains, bicycles, and everything in between.
Throughout its early trading history, those organizing the movement of coffee have struggled to capture the value they create. For example, when French poet Arthur Rimbaud opened an export outpost in Harar in 1880, coffee fell “in value day by day, and profits barely covered shipping charges,”[5] despite the fact that coffee trade was promoted as a lucrative activity. By 1962, Brazil and other Latin American countries had been working for decades to solve problems of supply and demand of coffee through various kinds of coffee trading agreements with the US, then (and still[6]) the world’s largest buyer of coffee.
Later that year, the United Nations Coffee Conference (UNCC) assembled leaders from coffee-producing countries and coffee-consuming countries together for the first time to the UN headquarters in New York. The UNCC—one of several single-commodity conferences held between 1963 and 1969—was unique for many reasons, not least because the conference led to a signed treaty and quota system to stabilize coffee prices and control supply and demand. It also obligated importing countries to enforce the quota system by “requiring a certificate of origin for every import shipment.” This was so strictly enforced that green coffee imports without a proper certificate could be barred from entering an import country.[7]
Even after the 1989 International Coffee Agreement (ICA) collapse, this “certificate of origin” requirement set the stage for a focus on terroir and “single origin coffees” that would become among two ways to differentiate specialty from commercial coffee, ultimately leading to a new way to trade: “direct trade.” Emerging from the desire of North American and European roasters to create alternative trading methods based on relationships with farmers, direct trade made it possible for roasters to pay higher prices for quality coffee, decoupled from the C price. Some may remember efforts increasing to cut out the local "middlemen" who would exploit farmers, such as the infamous “coyotes” of Latin America who exorbitantly raised prices and kept profits for themselves. To date, many of the visionary traders and roasters remain committed to relationships and higher prices, such as importers like Mercanta Coffee Hunters who, since 1996, offer a minimum price guarantee of US$1.80 that remains disconnected from commodity market prices.
But the directness of direct trade depends upon many factors, and the phrase overlooks the complex web of coffee professionals involved in moving coffee from one continent to another. Without any regulations or a consistent definition, direct trade doesn’t necessarily redistribute wealth from the Global North to the Global South. Although this method may offer higher prices to farmers with long-term contracts based on genuine relationships and quality coffee, omitting the “middlemen” entirely is rarely possible. While direct trade purported to cut out the “middle,” in some cases it just made them less visible. At best, isn’t “direct trade” misnamed, since so little of moving coffee is ever direct?
Case Study: From Kenya to Canada
Let’s explore the under-discussed complexities of coffee’s travels from port to port, using a case study example of how Kenyan coffee might journey to Canada. Our starting point will be Nairobi, Kenya to the smaller Maritime city of Halifax, located in Nova Scotia, a province on the eastern coast.
More than 85% of Kenya’s coffee is traded through the government-run Nairobi Coffee Exchange, an auction system that began in 1935 under British colonialism to grade, sell, and export green coffee.[8] Today, Kenya exports green coffee to more than 45 different countries, with most sent to Germany, Belgium, and the United States.[9] COVID-19 closures forced the auction to become virtual, but before that, every Tuesday Kenyan-based exporters would sit in a dark, wooden, theatre-like auditorium, facing a large screen, to press a buzzer to bid on coffee they wanted to purchase. Green coffee buyers had a panoply of choices in the nearby sample room, enabling them to look at the bags of all available Kenyan grades or certifications of coffee.
Large stores of green coffee wait at warehouses such as Bolloré Logistics in Nairobi, where dozens of people work to move coffee: sewing the top of jute bags, loading bags in the mammoth storage unit, packaging bags on pallets, moving bags into trucks or containers—even milling or sorting beans. Once purchased and all paperwork is signed, Kenyan coffee moves from Bolloré by truck or train more than 269 miles to the coast, to the Port of Mombasa. By the time the container reaches the port, dozens of hands have already transferred its movement, with many more hands part of transporting coffee from the port of departure (POD) to its destination (port of loading, or POL).
When I asked Elizabeth (“Liz”) Bishop, green coffee buyer for Halifax’s Java Blend, about the specific journey Kenyan coffee would take from Mombasa, I thought the route would be relatively direct, as Halifax is one of Canada’s key port cities. But I was mistaken: between the foibles of the global shipping network and nascent demand for Kenyan coffee in Atlantic Canada, the journey is far more complex.
First, there’s no direct route from Mombasa to Halifax, and two containers of Kenyan coffee will not necessarily take the same ocean route even if they’re both headed for the same destination: routes are determined by bookings and vessels, and may take months. Those going through the Suez Canal may take less time, but a container still is likely to pass through at least one transhipment port—where coffee containers are unloaded and reloaded to a new vessel— which may even change destinations en route, and where more delays are inevitable. (Mercanta’s Stephen Hurst recalled a container leaving Kenya last year that stopped at three transhipment ports towards its final destination, which was delayed for months.)
After all these tangles, coffee then stops at the Port of New York and New Jersey, before making its way to the Continental Warehouse, where bags will be palletized and strapped (wrapped with plastic cellophane). If they were destined for Halifax, Liz would arrange for a trucking company to collect the coffee in New Jersey and drive it up the eastern seaboard. Once across the border into Canada, it still needs to drive through New Brunswick to Nova Scotia. After 269 miles from the Bollaré warehouse to the Port of Mombasa in Kenya and months at sea, this journey by truck (more than 875 miles) adds at least two weeks to the already long two- to three-month journey—and that’s without including coffee’s journey from farms to Bollaré first.
Only “after arriving to the Java Blend storage facility in Nova Scotia,” Liz says with a sigh of relief, “the coffee officially becomes ours.”
Expanding Our Notion of the “Middle”
Once upon a time, the phrase “middlemen” may have been a handy descriptor, but it’s out of date: not only because so many people involved in moving coffee are women, but because the “middle” of coffee is not a fixed part of the global supply chain. What may be the “middle” depends on a complex coffee web based on dozens of moving factors. Indeed, using the phrase in coffee may have always been a misnomer—since “middlemen” are defined as people or companies that buy “things from the people who produce them and [sell] them to the people who want to buy them”[10] — and those in the middle have often done more than merely “buy” and “sell.”
With this oversimplification, we overlook key activities that take place in the middle. Perhaps most importantly, importers serve as risk mitigators: with insurance and lower rates of finance. Susan Heller Evenson, a trader at Atlas Coffee Importers, told me that “sometimes we’ll obtain a booking only for the steamship line to cancel it last minute because the ‘mother vessel’ doesn’t have space even though the initial ‘feeder vessel’ does. Then our logistics team keeps trying for a later booking, or has to start over with a different steamship line, often at a higher rate.”
While the topic of “who bears the risk of insurance” may not be coffee’s most alluring topic, those who manage the paperwork, and accurately complete dozens of customs forms, may be among coffee’s unsung heroes.
Second, in seeing traders as mere “buyers” and “sellers,” we oversimplify what it means to “transport” coffee. After all my interviews, imagery of a jigsaw puzzle persists in my mind: coffee transactions are only possible thanks to the adaptability of logistics managers and the alacrity of transportation professionals who move, adjust, and move again containers of green coffee from its POD to its POL. Susan's comparison of logistics to the video game "Tetris" also struck me: “logistics may appear boring to those on the outside,” she remarked, but it is both “essential and fascinating.”
Melissa Kelley, logistics manager at Atlas, taught me about how much time her team spends verifying documents and confirming the details of each shipment, which she jokingly referred to as “the glamor of logistics.” The work of ensuring that even the seemingly mundane details are correct on each form does impact farmers, especially as ownership of coffee transfers along its pathway from warehouse to warehouse. If traders and logistics teams don’t send accurate paperwork, payments to farmers may be significantly delayed, and the longer green coffee waits on the water or in storage, the more coffee quality may diminish. Tardy payments are felt more deeply by farmers in origin countries, like Kenya, who rely on coffee as a key foreign exchange earner.
Coffee in the Time of COVID
More than ever, the role of importers as risk mitigators serves an important, if underappreciated role, since pandemic-related disruptions to global supply chains have led to logistical nightmares for coffee. As the effects of the initial shutdowns balloon into long queues at ports and shortages of containers, booking requests are still being rejected or cancelled last minute.
Even more upsetting to all whom I interviewed are the costs that have doubled or tripled based on carrier or warehouse fees. Set by ports and carriers to incentivize the quick movement of goods through the system, such fees are passed on to the importer, while coffee waits to be offloaded at ports: storage fees if the container remains past the “free time,” carrier demurrage (while coffee waits at the terminal), or detention fees (if an empty container returns to the terminal late).
As Susan explains, “Warehouse handling fees and storage fees have risen, but those are separate from the fees associated just with receiving a container: the main costs there are from the port and steamship lines.” Is the motive for such egregiously high fees driven by greed or necessity? It’s hard to determine, given the congestion of goods coming in and “a shortage of workers to move it,” from warehouse workers to truck drivers.[11] “Ports simply don’t have the capacity to move the container through at the current pace,” Susan continued, “and warehouses are raising their rates for many reasons, including the sky-rocketing cost of lumber, making wooden pallets more expensive.”
Several importers told me stories of “eating” costs, such as unexpected, expensive customs exams, even when they know they’ll lose their margins, otherwise they worry producers won’t get paid—that kind of commitment is part of what led me to write this article in the first place. Repeatedly in my conversations with roasters and importers, I heard their concern for keeping producers’ payments as high as possible and making them as quickly as possible. While there’s no doubt that some coffee traders continue to exploit farmers, a more nuanced picture of transporting coffee needs to emerge. After all, “delays and disruptions are not only a logistics matter,” Stephen shared. “The far greater issue is the need for vast amounts more funding to pay for containers that are on lengthy voyages and not yet available for sale and delivery."
From pandemics to geopolitical conflicts, things can fall apart quickly when moving coffee from its country of origin to its destination. Transporting coffee takes ingenuity, patience, and above all, an ability to make lemons out of lemonade. All the work it takes to facilitate coffee’s transactions and transport are crucial for consumers to enjoy their cup of coffee; as a service provider, everyone involved in the transport of coffee should make living, fair, equitable wages.
As the quest for sustainable coffee continues, transparency from this “middle” part matters more than ever. And while there’s still much more to do to honor the labour of baristas and farmers, let’s not forget that the work of those in the middle also deserve our appreciation and respect. ◇
ERIKA KOSS is an Authorized SCA Trainer for the Sustainability Coffee Skills program, a PhD Candidate in International Development Studies at Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia, Canada and a Research Associate at the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Nairobi in Kenya.
The author thanks Elizabeth Bishop, Susan Heller Evenson, Stephen Hurst, Melissa Kelley, and interview participants in Kenya who wished to remain anonymous, for their time and for teaching her about coffee logistics.
References
[1] Brooke Masters, “Supply Chain Bottlenecks: ‘It’s Been Nuts’,” Financial Times, accessed February 01, 2022. https://www.ft.com/content/a3e973df-d6da-48c2-a43c-3a8acc2f1a5c.
[2] Majka Burhardt, Coffee Story: Ethiopia (Wisconsin: Ninety Plus Press; Addis Ababa: Shama Books, 2011), 3.
[3] Jeff Koehler, Where the Wild Coffee Grows: The Untold Story of Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup (New York, NY: Bloomsbury USA, 2017), 101.
[4] Koehler, Where the Wild Coffee Grows, 80.
[5] Koehler, 91.
[6] International Coffee Organization. Monthly Trade Statistics: September 2021, Imports by Selected Importing Countries from All Sources. https://www.ico.org/prices/m4-imports.pdf
[7] International Coffee Organization. Monthly Trade Statistics: September 2021, Imports by Selected Importing Countries from All Sources. https://www.ico.org/prices/m4-imports.pdf
[8] “NCE Background,” Nairobi Coffee Exchange, last modified February 27, 2015, https://nairobicoffeeexchange.co.ke/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=17:nce-background.
[9] “Main International Destinations for Coffee Exports from Kenya in the Season 2018/2019,” Statista, last modified June 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1154491/export-of-coffee-from-kenya-by-main-destinations/
[10] “Middlemen, n.” Collins English Dictionary 2022. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/middleman
[11] “Rising Logistics Cost, Explained,” InterAmerican Coffee, https://www.interamericancoffee.com/news/logistics-costs-explained/. See also: “What Happened to Supply Chains in 2021?” Council on Foreign Relations, last updated December 13, 2021, https://www.cfr.org/article/what-happened-supply-chains-2021
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