The remnants of colonialism continue to produce winners and losers economically, with the winners stuck in local maxima where they extract value from the people, but the people themselves see only marginal benefit, and development is stuck at a snail's pace.
As with seemingly everything in life, the incentives for the different players really don't line up. Consumers lose, producers lose, and only a select few middlemen win anything at all.
The reason New York City is the biggest city in the US is because when the Erie Canal was built, the agricultural riches of the Midwest had a route to world markets. Where you have a major seaport, you also need major banks and major insurance companies to smooth out the financial needs of traders and shippers, providing the funds right away back to the farmers, instead of them waiting till the voyages were complete. (without the Erie Canal, New Orleans would have become the largest city in the US)
Yes, there is a lot of money in trading, banking, etc. At every step of the transaction pyramid, a %age is added to the price, and the %age fees charged on that go up accordingly. But that measures the true value of the product at each stage; if you have a cheaper way of getting the same product to the same stage cheaper, the (supposed) riches will be yours.
The socialist instinct ("anybody getting rich must be cheating") unfortunately obscures the real problem ("monopolists and cartels controlling supply and setting prices are the true enemies of the people") which hinders solving it; by putting capitalism in your gunsights, you make enemies out of natural allies.
He does a two-episode deep dive into the Kenyan coffee market here, which is worth a listen: https://timwendelboe.no/2024/03/inside-kenyas-coffee-market-...
Also the fact that everyone alive today is so as a result of either being on the winning side of colonialism or from their ancestors otherwise clubbing somebody else over the head.
Compassion is the root of all virtue, and the balm for all vice. With a greater attention to compassion, every member of the chain of persons that grow, pick, process, market, sell, and even own Kenya coffee will help contribute to a better, fairer, and less deleterious to the Earth, system of farm-to-table.
Being compassionate includes being honest in one's business dealings, as well as not being greedy for exhorbitant profit. It also endures that everyone in the pipeline is actually performing a useful service, not just being an unnecessary middleman adding needless cost and other encumbrances.
And, of course, the Kenyan system was set up by the English Empire, so its parasitic pattern of worming its way into the fabric of all economic transactions is baked into their system. Yes, it's going to be difficult to extricate that selfishness from their system, but it's difficult for every culture to rid itself of the parasitism of selfishness in our societal systems. Note that ALL our current systems have that oft-dominant component present in them, causing waste and grief for all but the callous owners.
In our every endeavor, compassion is the only guaranteed path forward that has no intrinsic negative elements or effects, only difficulties due to our idioticly selfish inertias -- selfishly callous disregard being the opposite of compassionate service to the whole's well-being.
That's a poor justification for it, though, and I don't want to live in a society that goes out of its way to view itself as Hobbesian.
As always, compassion is the answer to all our problems, even the thorny one of finding out how to fairly reward those who innovate, while preventing them from devastating the Earth and her peoples while they do so.
And, above all, we must not let the wealthy and their attorneys make the effing laws or elect our leaders. That's always a nightmare receipe for a bad system, and here we are.
https://timwendelboe.no/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/T_Wendelb...
https://www.gottahaverockandroll.com/ItemImages/000025/jul18...
We're all winners here and that's far better than the alternative.
I think this gets a little muddied in The Discourse, because tons of pro-market anti-monopolist and anti-cartel[1] policies (like, you know, any preference for more trust-busting than the post-late-'70s neutered version) get painted as socialism in, especially, the US, simply because it's regulation and since the rise of Chicago-school jurisprudence and legislative influence, the fall of anti-capture and money-influence-mitigating regulation of media over several decades, and generally the ascendance of the Reagan-associated neoliberal outlook across all of mainstream American economic politics until very recently, regulation is the enemy of capitalism in many folks' minds, even when it's (god this is frustrating) laser-focused on making markets freer in the sense of their function, not the sense of "less-regulated".
The result is that people who simply think "barely-regulated markets" aren't fix-everything magic fairy dust that can't possibly be improved by a couple more laws and enforcement mechanisms, or even in a some cases by flat out replacement by a government program, find themselves rhetorically connected to nationalize-much-of-the-means-of-production Marxism-curious socialists (besides not being so removed from Nordic-style democratic-socialists to begin with)
[1] frankly, I find it convenient in certain company to shorthand "shitty tending-toward-captured markets, sacrificing efficiency and human decency for the comfort of a few" as "capitalism" given the actual outcomes and evident tendencies of systems the leaders of which emphasize and tout how capitalist they are, and the frequent expressed and revealed preferences of folks who like to promote themselves as particularly capitalistic, for the same reason it's kinda fair to regard communism as authoritarian and anti-democratic in practice, but I'll gladly entertain other usage for the sake of conversation.
You say colonialism opened up Kenya to the global market. But nearly every country in the world, the colonized and the uncolonized, is now part of the global market, so it is not true that Kenya would not be part of the global market today without it.
What’s described in the article is a situation where the government has introduced export licensing and endorsed a coop system that effectively cements organizations in their current positions in the market.
It’s not just governments that do this, commercial interests do too by acting as gatekeepers.
I am by no means “putting capitalism in my gunsights” here - however it’s clear that one of the issues is corrupt and poor regulation. That’s not to say there shouldn’t be regulation, but that it should aim at stimulating a fair market where honest traders are able to transact freely and dishonesty is punished.
Kenyans can't fight the "monopolies" and "cartels", indirectly funded by western actors to keep exploiting their cheap labor to cultivate coffee. The large coffee market you speak of is not elevating the average man, stuck in a lobor-intensive and severly underpaid activity, benefiting a global system of exploitation.
Vietnam, like Kenya, emerged from a coffee industry shaped by colonial-era inequities. Yet through reforms, robust state support for smallholder farmers, and a focus on infrastructure, Vietnam has positioned itself as a global coffee powerhouse. While the initial focus on robusta was quantity-driven, there’s now a shift toward quality, which is helping Vietnamese coffee expand into new markets.
Kenya’s situation feels similar yet distinct. It has an unparalleled coffee heritage, and with thoughtful reforms—empowering smallholders, encouraging direct trade, and finding the right balance between quality and disease-resistant hybrids—it could reclaim its standing on the global stage.
The article beautifully captures the systemic challenges and the hope for transformation. I really believe Kenya’s coffee can rise again, stronger and fairer, just as Vietnam is starting to do. It’s inspiring to see how coffee connects people and places across the world in such unique ways!
Did it end up being the fun side project you expected?
I never knew what my coffee went through.
The Ugandan coffee was really good.
The rest get fed to global capitalism in one way or another, the ways varying, but the outcome being pretty consistent: they're broke, they're in debt, and despite oftentimes being quite rich in resources, remain both of those things.
Empathy and compassion are social virtues, however if you bake it into the underlying governmental systems, you can end up in situations where those who are in control get to decide which type of “compassion” to enforce.
All you should have to do in cases like this is tell them you simply do not believe in the things they do and to not press it again. If they continue, things are obviously not coming from a place of compassion – they’re just selfish intolerant assholes.
And if you think you're safe in the middle class, it was predicted that and would seem to be bearing out as correct that once capitalism has largely completed exploiting the underclass, it can't simply stop exploiting. The next class up becomes the underclass. Then the next. Then the next until we're all broke save for the rich on top, at which point the entire arrangement stalls, money stops flowing, and the system collapses into anarchy.
The project of neoliberalism is difficult to fully articulate, but a major component at least is the "taming" of capitalist economic systems so as to make them sustainable. This project succeeded for a good amount of time, but that was also predicated on having nations to exploit, and room to grow markets. As those things become less true the entire system seems less stable overall. I mean personally I've witnessed three "once in a lifetime" economic crashes so far, and we're looking to be winding up for another one with the incoming administration and their bonkers non-understanding of tariffs.
Your family's views are unequivocally wrong. Acting upon homosexual desires, like all other choices we make, is a personal choice; so long as no one is being forced to do anything, and the object of one's desire is sexually mature (each society must define that, itself, but let them be adults, respect their choices, and help them understand the situation), there is no sin there that I know of, except for, perhaps, a bit of greedy waste of sexual energy, but that is ubiquitous, AFAICT.
No, what makes a person deserving of hell is to disregard the happiness of others, or to even cruelly create unhappiness via oppression. We are to love one another, not judge them for their personal choices. Besides, it looks to me like many, or perhaps most, gay folks were born that way, in the same way we understand the biology of trans folks' brains likely differ in ways that are counter to "normal" sexually dimorphic structures (Dr. Robert Sapolsky details this in his freely available Human Behavioral Biology class from Stanford). Regardless, one's sexuality (and gender identification) is one's own business, so long as what we do is consensual with other adult participants.
No one is truly practicing religion if universal compassion is not the teaching or the goal. Of course, liars and hypocrites and the willfully ignorant say otherwise, but what they say doesn't count for sh_t. You can identify them because, beyond their ebullient, self-satisfied faces of perceived self-superiority, they are deeply unhappy and very likely to have no power over their own demons. Such is the fate of the cruel hypocrites. When we sow unhappiness, that is what we reap.
I disagree with your last paragraph, though. There is only one kind of compassion: gentle, kind, and respectful (at least to some extent), and it is not any one religion's purview to determine it. It is a human potential, and a human requirement, required for our personal and societal evolution towards peace and happiness, each and every one of us. Anyone who tells you "their" compassion is special or solely of one path or another is just another over-confident fool who has been deceived into believing their false sense of self-superiority. That way is the way of the oppressors, the tyrants, and their followers who cause so much mischief and misery in this world.
But, no, there is no compulsion in religion, so it should never be baked into any govt, but we can and should bake fairness in regulations regarding taxes, income reporting, and even minimum and maximum wages, so that the whole of society is, if not benefitting, at least not harmed by their commerce. No company can operate without either the consent of the state or this world's entire cultural and technological apparatus. We can at least ensure that their profit is not wholly destructive.
The argument goes -- and I think there is a lot to this argument -- that using "remnants of colonialism" to refer only to, for example, an extensive bureaucracy that excludes people who produce much of its proceeds is misleading, because other extensive institutions that are also remnants of colonialism are an important part of commerce, law and order, and public welfare all over the world.
Most coffee is shipped in raw bean form and roasted at the destination. So bad roasts are not the fault of Vietnamese coffee per se.
The solutions here aren't arcane magic or anything: Money needs to leave the rich, and get to the working class to re-stabilize consumer habits. But since the Reagan era's slashing of all manner of corporate regulations, the system seems either incapable or unwilling to let that happen, no matter how much of an imminent threat it presents to that system. So we go on and circle the drain.
You're describing traditional Vietnamese coffee for ca phe sua or ca phe den, it's close to burnt coffee because the sourced coffee beans are shit so they have to roast close to charcoal that's why we have to add a lot of sugar or condensed milk.
If you want to have coffees that taste close to specialty coffee then there are some local shops that colab or have their own farms that grow quality beans, but Idk if there's exporting roasted coffees.
I've seen a Vietnamese coffee brand from Amazon with fancy branding but my bet is still shitty coffee. Then the recommended way would be traveling to Vietnam, maybe?
He knows a lot about roasting yes, he's not anywhere near some consensus god in coffee roasting no one can touch
Wankery abounds in coffee.
It is not pleasant to think about it in these terms; but it does seem like some of the greatest improvements in general human welfare have their roots in relatively ungenerous undertakings by methodical, reasonable, self-interested actors. The Romans roads and the Pax Romana, and the profound legacy of Roman law, were not the result of a benevolent desire to help everyone in the world and save them from evil.
Kenya had sovereignty in production, but not in capital - which is what was needed to climb up the value chain.
Historically, Kenya's largest capital market has been the UK, and as such Kenya's administration was unable to break the oligopoly of coffee purchasers who were British-Kenyan dual nationals and descendants of British settlers.
The same kind of land reforms that former colonies like Indonesia, Vietnam, India, etc were able to drive did not happen in Kenya.
Now corporations from those former colonies are gobbling up land and production in Kenya and other African nations, but domestic African (excluding South Africa) continue to remain on the back foot.
1. There's the technical wanker, who has the best tools and might roast their own beans even, but generally still drinks shite coffee.
2+3. There's the Keurig wankers and the anti-Keurig wankers, one of whom thinks they're drinking good coffee and one of whom can't stand that someone is enjoying something they don't.
4. There's the free trade wankers, who want beans from a plantation in Costa Rica owned by someone from Texas.
5. There's the roast alchemy wankers, who believe that you need to overcomplicate the roasting process as much as possible in order to eek out that 2.9% acidic roast flavor profile at exactly 203.4 degrees.
Buy good but cheap beans from a semi-local roaster, and don't let them get too old. Bam, you'll have coffee better than 99% of people.
Robusta coffees are much more popular across Asia, and there is a preference to mix coffee with milk.
In Europe and the US, there is a preference to drink Arabica coffee neat.
Starbucks had to pivot away from coffee to tea in India for that reason, and Starbucks in Vietnam failed due to their Arabica heavy bias [0] (also, Coffee shops in VN tend to also serve an equally robust Tea menu, which Starbucks fails at)
There are some solid coffee purist shops in D3, but the average consumer prefers Highland, Phuc Long, or Trung Nguyen Legend style shops and mixed coffees.
That said, the same problem mentioned in the blog above are slowly manifesting in VN as well. My in-laws are/were coffee farmers in Gia Lai, but they and their peers have pivoted to nuts like Macadamias instead because margins are better and Coffee is too commoditized
> I've seen a Vietnamese coffee brand from Amazon with fancy branding but my bet is still shitty coffee
Yep.
VN has a good FMCG market now, but they don't really target the US for exports.
The identification of "freedom of market participants to do whatever they want" as being the "free" in "free markets" is exactly the problem here, in my view—and I'd go further and claim that confusing the two things has been a deliberate sophistic practice (among others, chief among them being "please don't notice I snuck in a couple sketchy axioms and 'as we all know's at the beginning, so that you accept the hundred pages of 'reasoning' based on them that follow") promoted by figures in some allegedly-intellectual circles, to make themselves useful to those who find that kind of thing beneficial, and so to personally gain from being professional BS peddlers.
(I'm not correcting you, here, just adding on—I'd guess we basically agree on at least the first, and most directly relevant to your post, sentence of the above)
"need to drink it fresh" is a red flag about the roast, usually, unless you really do prefer something fairly dark. Light roasted coffee should be let to gas off for at least a few weeks.
That was a temporary blip because the underclass had been temporarily exported to a bombed-out Europe that was unable to meet its production needs, giving the US a huge market and very little manufacturing competition. Then came the Nixon shock, stagflation, and Reagan.
Interestingly, those earlier studies claiming to show that brains of the trans-identifying are atypical for their sex didn't control for sexuality, and many used exclusively homosexual cohorts.
So the findings were actually brain differences relating to homosexuality - later studies that controlled for sexuality (including same-sex and opposite-sex attracted transsexuals in the study population) couldn't replicate the earlier results relating to sexually dimorphic brain structures.
Instead, researchers found functional differences in brain regions relating to body perception, similar to what is seen in body dysmorphic disorder patients.
> (Dr. Robert Sapolsky details this in his freely available Human Behavioral Biology class at Stanford).
There is a video where he discusses this, albeit without properly citing any studies, but his description of the research is out of date. Probably it's an old recording.
With increased financializarion and abstraction of tradable assets - the capital class no longer has to worry about "goods" or "customers" (in as much as they may be indicators of bad stocks with a dim future). Services are the future: as far as they are concerned, the amount of profits available in housing or healthcare may be infinite, of you need the chart to go up, increase the price of the cancer drugs in your portfolio.
Not sure on the off gassing comment, I drink what I think tastes good. Espresso pretty much exclusively, lightly fruity, low acid, with a rich sip and a non-bitter aftertaste.
There's something unsettling about the might makes right amd post-hoc justifications dor colonialism. Especially considering the colonialists did not have those "noble" goals in mind. No one lauds Google the way they laud the British empire, yet the same exploitation vs. public benefit arguments apply.
It truly is, too.
I do appreciate the tropes of "It is the year 4,000 BC, and you are immortal, the pyramids are being built. You make $10,000 a day, tax-free, and spend none of it..."
But even that is hard to digest.
I'm in my mid-40s. If I tell my friends, "Someone gave you a million dollars a day, every single day since you've been born. And yet, there are multiple people out there with ten times more money than you," it becomes more digestible.
And still just as unconscionable.
Yes, my understanding of Dr. Sapolsky's work comes from rather old videos he did, so, sure, I don't doubt that what you're saying is probably true, but I'm not a neuroscientist, so I'm going to have to rely upon the expertise of others to validate any claims/results. Thanks for your explication.
Regardless, what is important is (IMHO) that our notions of how genderish traits can mix and match in different individuals in ways that don't match our classical notions of gender. The best result of that would be recognizing that we have to take each person as they are, and let them be their happiest self, by their measure.
At the end of the day, however a person justifies it, respectful, kind, gentle-as-possible compassion is the best policy for us all, to everyone, always. It is always our choice.
It's also almost never persecuted either, for obvious reasons. But totalitarian governments are usually not confident enough to officialize their money-movements. They usually claim to fight corruption with all their might.
I was never a coffee drinker at all until I spent a month in Kenya 6 years ago helping a startup get off the ground (ex CTO/CEO lived in Nairobi at the time). I tried the local coffee as was customary (when in Rome...) and because the Kenyans were SO passionate about their local coffee.
I was floored. I got completely hooked, and to this day have not found quality Kenyan coffee here in the USA. The coffee in Kenya is incredible, puts the crap Americans pay $$$ for at Starbucks to absolute shame.
A high quality roast, a decent grinder and a pour-over will make home brewed coffee that is not even recognizable next to the swill they sell at Starbucks. To be fair though, at Starbucks' scale it neigh impossible to produce consistent flavor with the quality of curated small batch coffee.
Economic reforms and cutting down bureaucracy are certainly part of the solution, but "just wait a bit longer" is too. If things continue progressing as they currently are, Nairobi will look a lot more like Seoul by mid-century.
Beginning in 1975, largely parallel with the coffee crisis in East Germany, the production of Robusta coffee began in Vietnam. Robusta plants grow faster, contain more caffeine, suit the climate of the Vietnamese Central Highlands, and lend themselves better to mechanized harvesting.
And, it is mind bending for some folks to hear that I abhor the taste of arabica coffee. It is so so bad.
Bad coffee beans if not roasted to charcoal state taste even worse. Argument that that most of available coffee in VN is made from pretty bad beans, so roasters have no other way to roast it to that level.
That's it.
homebrew has a pretty straightforward meaning... beer you brewed at home. It's actually legally defined that way too
As an occasional home roaster: the darker the roast the more the coffee loses the flavors related to the character of the original bean and the more they take on the flavor of the roasting process.
One of the major advantages of home roasting is that you can get premium beans from small farms (for relatively cheap as well!), this offers flavors and quality that are only available to small coffee shops simply because their aren't enough beans produced for a nationwide chain to offer to all their shops.
However, if you're getting high-quality, single origin beans it's much better to aim for a lighter roast since you will be tasting the (often even fruity) flavor of the original bean. This is also why small, high-end coffee shops tend to favor lighter roasts.
But even if you're a regional chain, you will likely struggle to provide consistent flavor from small batches so you'll, at the very least, work with larger farms. At the scale of Starbucks you're going to have trouble sourcing anything from a single farm, and you also want year over year consistency. Often small coffee shops pride themselves on short term offerings, because they're appealing to an audience that understands and values this. However the average Starbucks consumer not only wants a coffee in Alabama to taste the same as Seattle, but they want coffee in 2025 to taste like they remember from 2015.
The only way to achieve this level of consistency and such a scale is to create extremely dark roasts.
edit: there are also, of course, flavor related and cultural reasons to choose darker roasts. Italians, for example, tend to favor darker roasts for espresso (in part because they can create blends using varieties like robusta beans, that under a light roast have a 'rubbery' taste, but can add boldness when mixed in with a dark roasted espresso blend).
Winners and losers I must note are the result of any system, even in ones of very high equity or even or especially a 'null system'.
The underclass? Or the WHITE MALE underclass?
As others have said, Vietnamese coffee was traditionally cheaper robusta beans, tended to be lower-quality, and was dark-roasted as a result. More recently, as Vietnam has gotten wealthier, there has been a craft coffee scene developing. I had great coffee in growing regions like Da Lat and Khe Sanh, and in specialty coffee shops in Hanoi like Dream Beans.
For example, in the past year I've seen a guy selling tamales from his car trunk, someone selling candy apples from a cooler on the side of the road, one person making crab boils from their house, and a ton of people doing small batch type things on FB marketplace. Most of these would violate our local cottage laws, but I've seen police officers buying the tamales for example!
I have no doubt if someone got sick they could probably win a civil case of sorts, but I don't think I've seen or heard of any kind of attempt to shut down any of this via law.
Who said police, courts, etc. are not remnants of colonialism? Also, what is the relevance of that to this discussion about coffee selling and the problems in the Kenyan coffee market?
Can you provide some examples and resources to back up this hard truth?
I do not need to get further from that.
The only expensive thing you need is a good grinder. Rest goes with a 26€ V60 and a kitchen scale.
It has a lot to do with the unprecedented improvement in material well-being in certain parts of the world, namely the colonizer nations and a handful of successful colonized ones. The majority of former-colony states are still struggling, most with the luxuries, many with the essentials, a few with even managing a stable state.
The hard truth is the people in the developed world have only had it as good as they do because so many in the developing one have gone without to a frankly criminal degree for far too long. And they continue to be exploited. If you don't believe me look the shipbreaking yards where barefoot Bangladeshi work with plasma cutters to hack up ships beached there, or the electronic scrap heaps where people set fire to piles of e-waste to salvage the metals within, on and on. There are hundreds if not thousands of these examples where the West continues dominating the global south in clear, unmistakable ways, and precious few where the relationship goes the other way.
As someone who has written extensively on this topic, both on the internet and not, it is frankly just offensive to see this viewpoint shared as though it's serious. Colonialism benefited colonial nations, because of course it did. It wouldn't have been done if it wasn't beneficial. To the colonized it represents an entire category of scars: some on their infrastructure, some on their economies, a lot on the places in which they live, a few on their actual bodies to this day, and many simply as a gigantic, unforgettable one across their collective souls.
It isn't really about the coffee, specifically, for the lion's share, and this can be said about many consumer goods. It's convenience, a cultivated flavor profile (think McDonald's fries), nostalgia, consistency, the small socialization … and generally a combo of a few of these things.
None of these are inherent to Starbucks, but they've captured a demographic that only needs to be captured once to be captured for life.
So: people paying $$$ for Starbucks aren't really paying for coffee at all, and wouldn't want a superior coffee if you gave it to them in a better environment at half price.
That Kenyan beans are least influenced by the roasting process, and thus more consistent?
Or that you don't have a strong preference for Kenyan beans, so any roast will do?
I think instead it has to do with the percentage of their clients that add sweeteners, perhaps the bitterness is better somehow as the base of a sugary drink.
But a dark roast is easier to produce, and easier to produce consistently. If you take high quality beans, and low quality beans, and roast them both to a dark level (let's say "French" or "Italian" roast), they're going to taste approximately the same. Therefore if you're producing coffee at a larger scale and want to save money, you can use cheaper beans and roast them dark to mask the imperfections that come with the cheaper beans.
There are some truly incredible coffees out there and a well-executed light or light-medium roast will bring out those flavors beautifully, but the quality starts at the coffee farm. You can't light roast a low quality coffee bean and expect those same excellent flavors.
Whoa, are they going for 26 euros in Europe? That's around 10x as expensive as they're sold in Japan. Or are you referring to the glass/ceramic ones?
Roastful is trying to apply a similar methodology to coffee roasting, by polling 32 industry experts.
And, the #1 roaster in their rankings this year is Tim Wendelboe.
You can debate the method, but it's not total wankery.
Also the African slave trade largely existed off the back of tribes conquering each other and selling the losers into slavery, which is also commonly how slavery works back into antiquity. The alternative to being sold into slavery is that they kill you.
"...sources suggest that 6 million Kenyans are employed directly or indirectly in the coffee industry."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_production_in_Kenya
Also:
"Over half a million Kenyan smallholder farmers are farming coffee. But they only produce 2 to 3 kilograms of cherry per tree on average, while there is a potential of over 30 kilograms per tree. This low productivity, coupled with low prices and high costs for labour and fertilizer, make it extremely difficult for smallholder farmers to mitigate or adapt to climate change, invest in good practices, access markets and attract competitive prices. And in the end, the whole coffee value chain in Kenya is at risk."
https://www.solidaridadnetwork.org/news/coffee-sustainabilit...
And it's like this for your village and your neighboring village and their neighboring village and so on.
Tell me about it when your neighboring villages' adult men are charging down the hill at you, filthy, starving, crazed and screaming at the top of their lungs, axes in hand.
Taste is subjective and you can call them snobs but they have a great point. Even if you love burnt flavors, there are far more ethical options than Lavazza.
This is happening in Vietnam as well (2nd largest coffee producer in the world).
Coffee margins are low because there are too many farmers and too few bulk purchasers, so most fermers have either switched to higher value nuts (eg. Macadamia) or sold the land off to tourism developers who can make a "Glam-Camping" experience for Korean, Japanese, or Thai tourists.
The cop thing doesn’t really matter. They stay in their lane until they don’t. I had an uncle who was NYPD, they’d randomly (from their pov) get tasked with cracking down on random crap. Sometimes they’d give folks a heads up.
In NYC the landlords are rapacious, so it’s difficult to compete with Pedro’s Taco Truck.
Robusta is the primary choice across much of Asia. Vietnamese are heavy coffee consumers (so the domestic market is strong) and VNese coffee is cost-competitive in Japan and SK due to FTAs.
Furthermore, for historical reasons Robusta cultivars tend to be very popular across Asia (just like the Phin or Filter Coffee - the metal apparatus for drip coffee is part of the Colonial Era exchange across Asia - or chicory coffee mix)
It's just about money. Too many farmers entered the coffee industry in the 1990s and 2000s as it was the cash crop of choice back then, and there are a handful of larger wholesalers who cornered purchasing.
Nuts make way more money than coffee because of better margins and lower cost of inputs. A lot of this is also driven by Food Processors, as VN cornered the nut processing market (eg. most nuts from sub-Saharan countries like Côte d'Ivoire get exported to VN for processing) so there was excess capacity.
My in-laws were part of the generation of displaced Vietnamese who were resettled in the Central Highlands for coffee cultivation back in the 70s-90s, but this mass migration of ethnic Vietnamese pissed off the indigenous Jarai and other Hmong+Khmer ethnic groups, which led to a sustained insurgency and a lot of horrid human rights abuses.
The current GenSec of Vietnam (To Lam) is notable for his career as the butcher of Gia Lai during his tenure there as part of the MPS.
Poverty isn't necessarily exploitation. The situation of Bangladesh would not be improved if every wealthier nation was suddenly sucked into the sea. In fact, the situation of Bangladesh would become considerably worse.
Bangladesh has grown rapidly by selling clothing to rich countries, and through the work of NGOs. Supposing we put a forcible stop to this "exploitation" by placing sanctions on Bangladesh, so no one can trade with it, and kicking out all of the NGOs. Bangladesh becomes much poorer.
>Colonialism benefited colonial nations, because of course it did. It wouldn't have been done if it wasn't beneficial.
According to an old European history textbook I read: Once you take into account the costs of conquest, infrastructure, and administration, plus the opportunity for colonial administrators to take a cut on the sly (since the monarch was thousands of miles away), colonies weren't profitable on net. Supposedly the Brits did colonialism first, and other European countries followed in Britain's footsteps because "that's what an industrialized nation does".
Do you believe Putin's invasion of Ukraine makes economic sense? I don't think that's what motivates him.
The invention of the map might be the deadliest invention in history. To paraphrase Carl Sagan: "Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could momentarily color a small additional part of their map with their nation's color."
>unprecedented improvement in material well-being in certain parts of the world, namely the colonizer nations
Compare a per capita GDP ranking of European countries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...
With a ranking of the largest empires:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires
The top 10 per capita wealthiest countries in Europe, from Wikipedia, are: Luxembourg, Ireland, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, San Marino, Iceland, Belgium, Austria.
The top 10 largest European colonial empires, based on my skim, belonged to: Britain, Russia, Spain, France, Portugal, Turkey, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Belgium.
There's just not much of a relationship.
> Most abandoned coffee farming and converted their farms into prime real estate.
Related: What do you think Silicon Valley and Los Angeles Valley looked like 100 years ago? Lots of fruit farms. Today? Housing and office buildings -- all considered prime real estate. Once farming became less valuable than the land, most farmers sold.
> Nairobi’s “heat.”
I'm one of the lucky people where any coffee is coffee for me. McDonald's, Starbucks, instant coffee, specialty coffee, cat pooped coffee? Yup, it tastes like coffee, I'm good to go.
One way to gain an intuition for the extent of the change is to consider population sizes. India in 1600 had about a tenth of its present population. To have a population so much larger, agricultural productivity in India, as well as in the rest of the world, had to increase a great deal in the intervening years.
Another way is to consider the spread of various conveniencies of life -- refrigerators, motor bikes, microwaves, automobiles -- and affordances they enable. Relatively few people in Bangladesh own motor vehicles, but many of them find work in commercial enterprises that are only possible because of the way that commercial trucks open up the interior to world markets. Something like 12% of the world's population has cars today, and that number is steadily increasing. I am not totally certain of this figure, but I believe about two thirds of households in the world have refrigerators.
The benefits of modernization are spread very unevenly amongst the world's peoples today (and we must acknowledge that another example I offered, of the Pax Romana, conferred many advantages specifically to the Romans) but it is hard to argue that there has not been a tremendous benefit worldwide as a result of changes brought about mostly by colonial powers over the last 400 years or so. The thing to consider is not what life in Bangladesh is like, relative to life in the Denmark (or the UK, &c), but what life in Bangladesh was like 400 years ago.
The Europeans do not have it as good as they do -- and, more generally, the world is not so much better off materially -- as a result of simply transferring well-being from one place to another. There were no automobiles, refrigerators, &c, to steal from other countries 400 years. The path to modernity involved real changes in human productivity that allowed for a genuine net benefit.
To dismiss the Romans, the colonials, &c, as of no benefit, however, is to deny reality. The Roman roads were genuinely of value to peoples besides the Romans. Perhaps the Chinese, to, will create institutions and a scope of activity that is of value to peoples outside of China. Probably not in Asia...
It's a great trade for an individual who wants to get rich. It's a potential disaster for a country whose 3rd biggest export is the thing nobody wants to do now.
Another way to get an intuition for it is the prevalence of various conveniencies of life. For example, I believe about two thirds of households in the world have refrigerators. About 12% of the world's households have cars. These and many other material benefits are possessed by regular people today but would have been out of reach 400 years ago to any member of the European nobility or, as Adam Smith puts it, "...an African king, the master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.". (In his time, Smith was commenting on how remarkable it was that an English workman could have pots and pans made of metal and a window made of glass.)
> most nuts from sub-Saharan countries like Côte d'Ivoire get exported to VN for processing
Also: What do you say about Italians drinking a cappuccino or macchiato (expresso shot with a splash of steamed milk)? From what I have seen while traveling in Italy, most Italians drink coffee at small coffee shops. Or French people drinking cafe latte?
Perhaps it's only good because their income from coffee was low due to inability to bypass parasitic intermediaries.
However, roasting coffee dark does homogenize the flavor of the coffee, and you do lose more and more of what that coffee tastes like. Coffees have a ton of different flavor compounds, and no two coffees are the same. There are quality issues and processing issues though that don't help to highlight this too, so it's hard to find coffee - even from people who know how to roast - that can shine in this way.
I think everyone should try a good coffee that has some punchy flavors - I'm not saying everyone should like it. It's a fun thing and should be experienced if you're interested.
Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's about making sure you can be competitive, and you as a particular business don't have an inherent right to be competitive. Instead it's a collective right to have access to competition.
A right to participate in a reasonable way does not go far enough in many markets.
Regulation is preferable. The Thai park was shut down because it trashed the place and competed with regulated, tax-paying food markets.
The only issue is how slow and inefficient German bureaucracy is. It wouldn’t be a problem to request compliance if it didn’t take months and waste everyone’s time as they’re trying to get off the ground.
Their civil war ended in 2010, Vietnam's in 1970-s
I’ve tried a good number of roasters on this list, and only a few come within batting distance of Father Coffee (not to be confused with Fathers) in Johannesburg and Rosetta Roastery in Cape Town. Those two roasters, the former more experimental and the latter more traditional, are doing wonders and punching well above their weight in the South African market. Both could easily be in the top 25, and Father is surely top 5.
Seriously, if you care about coffee and find yourself in Johannesburg, go to Father and grab as many beans as you can carry.
But to me, Starbucks still tastes terrible (burned), and Dunkin Donuts is nasty.
In recent years I've ordered my roasted coffee from coffeebeanery.com, and I've been pretty happy. I'm pretty sure all of the varieties I get are Arabica.
Average High: ~28°C (82°F) Average Low: ~14°C (57°F)
I'm only learning about the history of economics myself. It seems a lot of people interpret Adam Smith as advocating against any government intervention, even in the case of price-fixing. For example: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/regulation-industry/misreadin...
I'm not convinced that it's deliberate. You can draw a parallel with free speech: is it about letting anyone say whatever they want, however loudly, as much as they want? Or is it about ensuring that everyone has a voice, i.e. preventing the loud people from drowning out or otherwise intimidating the quiet ones. You could well argue for the latter, but many people in the West assume it means the former.
Either way, I'll take this over any other SEA or Asian country where it's a hassle to find coffee outside metro hotspots. Cafes and Coffee here is available everywhere and usually within a 30 seconds walk.
Can you identify some of the most significant negative consequences of colonization that remain today? Things that wouldn't have happened if those people had engaged in global trade themselves while still being self-governing. As I understood it, the legacies were mostly good - especially government institutions and united nationhood instead of separate enemy tribes.
Side note:
I rarely drank coffee (or tea, although I do drink tea again, somewhat, nowadays).
I used to drink Indian-style milk tea almost daily, earlier, in school, college, and later.
So once, some years ago, when I walked into a Cafe Coffee Day [1] shop (an Indian coffee shop chain, possibly modeled on Starbucks), and after looking at the menu, ordered a macchiato. it was a pleasant surprise to find that it tasted very good. :)
(I had nothing against coffee, it was a common drink at home, growing up, the filter coffee [2] kind, but also Nescafe and Bru, just that I did not prefer it much, later.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%A9_Coffee_Day
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_filter_coffee
Filter coffee has kind of cult status in some states of South India.
Applies to vegetables and other vegetarian foods, too :)
Ever tried eating raw wheat, rice, pulses or vegetables? Only some vegetables are okay in salads.
The reasons and conditions are totally different in economies like those in Africa that are setup for wealth extraction vs. America where they are setup for wealth generation. The book ‘why nations fail’ does a great job of explaining this.
- 20 year wait for a cart permit. _ Shady black market license resales from veterans (who have priority access to licenses - which is great in theory) - If you use water you need a ‘food’ license - Illegal to store your cart anywhere but a licensed depo that charges exhorbitant - very high penalties for unlicensed distribution
I think the insurgency is largely dead, but the Central Highlands remains very poor and smuggling+corruption are sustained issues.
Capital.
Historically, Asian LDCs like Vietnam and Cambodia have had access to Japanese and Korean development loans and grants which allowed for businesses to build and innovate.
Most Sub-Saharan economies did not have those kinds of capital markets.
Depending on where you are in Africa, the Gulf, Turkey, India, and China have stepped in to fill the capital gap, but they tend to be much more extractive in their terms.
also french coffee is horrible mostly because it is controlled by only one group in a mafia like fashion where they rent you the coffee machine but you have to buy their beans. italians can make good coffee with old espresso machines and average beans which says more about their skills than anything else.
My girlfriend manages several Airbnbs around Hanoi, and many of these buildings have ground floors designed for small businesses—something that’s very common in Vietnam. In 2019, we decided to turn the ground floors of her rental locations into coffee shops and finished setting them up just in time for December that year!
Of course, as luck would have it, COVID-19 wasn’t exactly great for either Airbnb rentals or coffee shops. Since then, we’ve both shifted focus to other projects, but we’re definitely planning to give it another shot in the future when the timing feels right!
If you are in the last box, you cannot get to the first one, but you can still move one step up by burning it. Plus you can add a lot of milk and cream and then it is almost the same anyway.
Overcooking and adding a lot of spices makes everything (more or less) edible. With less cooking and less spices, you can better taste the original ingredients.
I'm sure you will agree that raw beef and a steak taste differently?
Well that seems a little silly, no? Humans are social creatures; cooperation is just as natural as any other human behavior (including fallibility). It seems almost a little christian in its doomful profession that humans are only our worst attributes.
Meanwhile, people that don't mind "burnt coffee" are the people that preferred coffee-based drinks from coffee shops. If I get a salted caramel mocha Frappuccino with two pumps of hazelnut - burnt beans are probably the only kind of beans I will be able to taste in that drink.
At no point did I dismiss the knowledge-transfer as being of no benefit. The point I was making is that it is very easy to be on a high horse and say "It was worth it" when you were not on the sharp end of the stick. By reframing the set-up with China as the imperial power, I hope to show the readers that the cost of "upliftment" might be something the unwilling subjects may consider culturally valuable (like democracy)[1]. Such one-dimensional analysis is intellectually lazy.
1. Imperialism has been dissected many times over the centuries, in fiction and otherwise, but it bears repeating.
But I really find it to be the best for daily quality coffee. Filters are easy to find, their products are durable and easy to clean.
Except their thermo pot. Not worth the money.
But they can be overpriced in Europe. Their electric water heater is around 190-200 euros if you can find one.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=cWvT
Also, 25% of homes in 1950 didn't have indoor toilets. It was very much not modern quality housing.
Note, more households in the US own their home now than they did in 1984. (I don't have numbers on this one back to the 50s.)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USHOWN
Fear about this is possibly suppressed memories of the 2008 recession, which was really bad!
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2024/sum...
https://someunpleasant.substack.com/p/a-nobel-prize-for-an-i...
Yes, colonialism was not profitable. They did it because we hadn't invented modernity yet so we didn't know how to be profitable.
One reason "Britain" (the UK) exists is that Scotland tried to get into colonialism, bankrupted themselves, and had to sell themselves to England.
Generally speaking, getting a lot of resources is actually bad for your economy because it outstrips your ability to develop value-added businesses and institutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
> Compare a per capita GDP ranking of European countries:
You're arguing with a Maoist (or someone who's been listening to them.) One thing about these people is that they believe Finland and Ireland are colonizers, because they just think all European countries are the same.
Who did Ireland, Finland, South Korea and Botswana colonize?
Second question: how did it work out for Spain, Scotland, and Russia?
good one, bro.
now, walk the plank.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_the_plank
I'm sending you to Davy Jones' locker.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Jones%27s_locker
:)
jk
Agreed! I use mine twice daily and love the coffee I make with it, and how easy it is to clean.
FWIW, Mao had some good ideas, and some crazy ones. Like most historical figures, really, but even then I wouldn't take being called a Maoist an insult. That said, no proper leftist of any stripe would call Ireland a colonizer nation. They may have attempted it, but the subsequent ratfucking on the part of Great Britain ever since then and their continued existence inside the geopolitical abusive relationship that is the United Kingdom brings them far closer, ethically, to the Congo than to Britain. Lest we forget fun times like the Great Famine, or as the Irish call it, "that time Britain took all the fucking food." Or, more accurately the landlords did, the handling of which is one of Mao's better ideas.
Maybe the Pax Sinica won't play out that way at all -- who knows.
Is it arguing in good faith to consider other perspectives outside of our own? Yes it is, and I consider the reverse to be in bad faith.
While I don't fully agree with Kant, I find the Universability of an approach to be a good filter for identifying not-okay actions that are justified by the perpetrators - sometimes me (a.k.a. the Silver Rule: "Don't do to unto others what you don't want to be done unto you")
My high school history teacher would share historical accounts and encourage us to analyze the authors motivations and biases.
It's a rich nation with a welfare state and universal healthcare.
This is an issue for anyone whose philosophy says that all rich countries got that way by stealing their wealth from the third world.
Arabica produces such a varied spectrum of cups, it’s really quite head scratching to hear you write off the entire species, yet still hear you drink robusta.
For specifics, its been a while since I tried it. I can seek out some to try again, if you want. I don't think it is as extreme as the "tastes like soap" reaction that many have on cilantro, but I'm growing to think it has to be similar.
I am not a expert on the science of cooking, these are just my casual, slightly scientific observations as a layman :)
But all these things were invented after colonialism of most colonial countries.
And they are prevalent in uncolonized countries in roughly the same ratios as colonized countries. Arguably the uncolonized (China being the main one) have more than the colonized (India being the main one)
> So, if the paper has so many problems, why did it prove so influential? First, because it utilized cutting-edge techniques at the time (instrumental variables was a new thing back in the 2000s), and because it used novel datasets and clever inference to answer a big-picture question. While “the conditions of colonization determined the institutional quality of colonies” is not a new idea (in fact, Marxist Karl Kautsky came up with a similar idea in 1907), treating it in a formal and empiric manner like this was fairly novel in the 2000s.
So it seems like the answer is not resoundingly clear at all, but the novel methods and analysis was worth the prize, not the perceived veracity of the claims.
Anyways, the topic is about how colonial powers set up institutions in colonized countries, and different types of institutions lead to different types of economic outcomes (inclusive vs extractive). But consider China and India. The former has no colonial institutions, having never been colonized. But both are growing at similar places with similar GDP growth rates (China being slightly ahead). So the idea that only a colonial power could build such institutions, thus all the negatives are outweighed. I don't buy that at this moment. I'm open to learning more though.
It is not strictly correct to say China was uncolonized. I suppose parts of it were not.
Global trade has, indeed, brought everything everywhere; but the present operation of global trade -- the norms used, the international bodies involved, even the weights and measures -- are all the result of power projection by western, colonial powers and prudent adaptation by other countries. Even China's legal system is an adaptation of a western legal system (the civil law). The prevalence of certain institutions is something we take for granted today but does have its roots in colonialism.
And, that's assuming that the neighborhood in question didn't get bulldozed for a freeway by Robert Moses or any of the dozens of urban planners that used eminent domain to rat fuck minority homeowners out of the meager scraps they had managed to acquire.
And, that's only racial minorities, that's not even going into women who thanks to being largely un-banked and the presumptions that finance was simply over their pretty little heads, and of course that their jobs were chronically underpaid if they even could get them, would be laughed out of a bank entirely if they tried to buy a home.
So like, was it ONLY white men buying homes? Nah. But it was predominantly white men buying all the homes you would actually want to buy and if you weren't a white man, you had an objectively, measurable harder time doing it.
While civil institutions were spread to colonies by colonialism, they were adopted by uncolonized countries also. Countries can adopt beneficial things without being taken over and having their resources and wealth extracted.
The same way Americans adopted civil rights from countries which had them earlier on. Europeans who banned slavery earlier than Americans did not need to invade America and extract its resources to bring them out of being a slave-owning polity.
Sorry to hear it didn't work out. They do so well with Ethiopian, Colombian, Rwandan (which is where my palette is dialed—berry, tea, honey, citrus), I assumed their treatment of the Kenyan beans was representative.
Do you have a source of Kenyan beans that tells the story of what Kenyan is like at its best? I'd love to try!
