Thursday, May 23, 2002


yay! my miss rancilio espresso cups are on their way, after a small shipping bobble. . .

they should be here tuesday. . .i'll report in-depth at that time.

you know, i loathe getting overly serious, but we really have to talk once again about the social problems caused by the world-low in coffee prices, and the coffee glut. until now i'm sure the majority of my readers in the u.s.a thought of this as merely my wacky liberal concern over a small problem far far away. but we're a connected little ball now, my friends, and the coffee depression is already part of our immigration problem.

of course as a new yorker, i'm pro-immigration. to my mind, anyone who has the gumption to show up here in new york is the kind of person who deserves a chance to find a job and become an american. there's no doubt the majority of my fellow new yorkers feel this way. however, large movements of people do cause social instability; the collapse of the mexican rural economy and social structure is not a desirable thing.

to prevent a flood of coffee farmers heading north, the mexican government is offering financial incentives for the farmers to plant timber trees instead of coffee. however, let's be honest. i suspect the mexican farmers will think like some of their fellows in colombia: why waste years growing relatively low-priced timber when you can turn a nice quick profit with . . .illegal drugs. even better, take the government timber incentive, and in the middle of your timber farms, tuck in a few more interesting crops. . .

we see this same result in ethiopia. there, in the historic homeland of coffee, farmers are pulling up their coffee trees and growing chat, (aka "qat," "khat," or "miraa") according to the addis ababa tribune. it's a drug, with effects that mix some of those of cocaine and marijuana. chat growing has been a problem in ethiopia for some time.

why should we care about a drug that's legal in several african and middle-eastern countries, and is in fact a social ritual in yemen? because of course, it's going to come here. it has already begun to arrive in britain. here in the u.s.a, chat is listed with heroin and cocaine as a "schedule one" drug.

look, no matter how one feels about the present war on drugs, one has to admit that turning over a significant portion of the world's agricultural capacity to them as coffee farmers struggle to make a living cannot be a good thing. clearly, the united nations and other development bodies -- such as usaid -- must do more to combat the coffee decline and/or provide farmers with desirable and relatively profitable alternatives. and leaders here in the u.s.a should get this on our priority list as well.

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