Gringo to the last drop…

Photo: Tom Tziros (http://www.flickr.com/photos/argos_t/)

This photo happens to be from Thessaloniki Greece, where there have been riots lately over a domestic issue (police brutality), but almost anywhere in the world where the Seattle coffee-seller has set up shop, you will find the same thing after people with a grievance pick up a few rocks.

Or, want decent coffee at an affordable price.

Even though my introduction to Latin American business was in the early 1990s, when I worked for a short time for a coffee importer and distributor in Kansas City, MO (there was even a “Richard’s Blend” which didn’t do too badly at a few selected cafes in western Missouri and east Kansas), and I could look at beans and tell you with some certainty where they were grown (and, in a pinch, whether they came from the Atlantic or Pacific side of some Latin American countries), I’m not a big coffee snob.  Nor think it’s worth paying some company in Washington State a sizable chunk of change for what I can get from a local seller for much, much less.  Coffee is coffee.

The Greek riots started with protests over a police shooting, but as the unrest has grown, so have the causes for complaints, foreigners being one.  The Greeks are upset with poor immigrants, but down this way, it’s the wealthy semi-immigrants that are undermining the local economy…. shopping for Colombian coffee.  OK, Colombian coffee probably is better than Mexican coffee,  and — thanks to Juan Valdez — assume Colombian coffee is what one must buy.  At least that’s the message I’m reading on the local on-line message board for ex-pats here in Mazatlan.  Where there is a well known MEXICAN coffee roaster and distributor.

Mexico is a NAFTA member state, and the U.S. and Canada are supposed to be favoring Mexican agricultural products over non-NAFTA products.  But, as with toys, textiles, electronics, etc. the U.S. was also keeping prices for consumer goods artificially low by buying from the cheapest supplier, whether that supplier was a piratical state like the People’ s Republic of China or not.  So, the U.S. is buying coffee from Colombia (with its absolutely horrifying labor and human rights record) over Mexico, where very good labor rights are often ignored, but where out of work farmers lose what few rights they do have when they are forced to become “illegal immigrants” in the United States because of … among many things… gringo’s insistence on Colombian coffee.

I hate to tell the local gringos this, but Mexican and Colombian soil conditions and climate in the coffee growing regions is the same.  Mexican are not traditional coffee drinkers, but there’s nothing unique either in the genetics or soil conditions of Colombian coffee… it’s all hype.  And Starbucks — like any other coffee roaster and distributor — looks first at where they can buy the cheapest beans, than only secondarily at the genetic variants:  Arabica beans are pretty much all the same, and the only advantage Colombian growers have over Mexican growers is that coffee has been a favored export crop for much longer than it has in Mexico.

It rubs me the wrong way then to see Colombian coffee sold in Mexico… after being exported to the United States, roasted, ground and returned as a “U.S. product”… bought eagerly by those ex-pats who want Mexico to remain low priced, but somehow provide the same goods and services these gringos received at home by exploiting Mexico (and Colombia).

So, if Greeks… or Mexicans sometimes don’t appreciate the joys of Starbuck’s, it’s understandable.  And, perhaps, admirable, that the citizens of coffee-growing countries sometimes realize that exporting their own products to be sold for the benefit of a foreign corporation isn’t a good deal.

Rock on, dudes! … I didn’t say that, and you didn’t read it.