Founded by slavery, coffee Brazil remains exclusive – 11/07/2023 – Café na Prensa

[RESUMO] In the 19th century, Brazil became the world’s largest coffee producer — a leadership it still maintains today — at the expense of the work of enslaved black people — only later replaced by European immigrants. After 200 years, the sector, one of the most important in national agriculture, remains in the hands of white men, from cultivation to industry. When contacted, the largest companies in the sector did not respond to questions on the matter.

Coffee made Brazil discover modernity

Coffee was introduced to Brazil in the 18th century through seedlings brought from French Guiana to Pará. But it was further south of the country that the fruit found fertile soil. Decades later, cultivation began to gain volume in the Vale do Paraíba region, between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

In the 19th century, the commodity had its boom. Exports grew rapidly until the country became the largest producer in the world – a position it still holds today.

The prosperity brought by coffee made Brazil experience for the first time the progress of modernity and material wealth and well-being, wrote Caio Prado Jr. It was at this time that the country began to have more railways and new means of communication and transport .

According to the sociologist, coffee gave rise to the last of the country’s three great aristocracies, after the planters and the large miners.

Coffee transforms São Paulo

Coffee growing made São Paulo the country’s great economic power and changed the landscape of the capital, which saw palaces being built to house the families of coffee barons.

“The great role that São Paulo achieved in the political scenario of Brazil, until it reached its effective leadership, was done at the expense of coffee; and at the forefront of this movement of ascension, and driving it, are the farmers and their interests. Almost all the biggest economic, social and political facts in Brazil, from the middle of the last century to the third decade of the current [século 20]unfold as a function of coffee farming”, wrote Prado Jr. in his classic “Economic History of Brazil”.

Such prosperity was based on an extremely exploitative slave workforce. Brazilian high productivity was due not only to the fact of using enslaved people in cultivation, but also to making them work much longer hours than in other places in the world.

This helps explain the fact that Brazil has achieved much greater production than its Caribbean competitors, for example. This is what researcher Rafael de Bivar Marquese, PhD and associate professor at USP (University of São Paulo), who developed studies on slavery in Brazil’s coffee economy, explains.

“The basic average in the Caribbean was one thousand coffee trees per slave. Here in Brazil it starts with 2,000 trees. In the Caribbean the average productivity of this worker was between 200 and 300 kilos per year. In Brazil, in the Paraíba Valley, in the middle of 19th century, it reached a level of 1,200 kilos per worker”, says Marquese.

Thus Brazil became the world’s largest coffee exporter. Brazilian production was so large that it caused a drop in prices on the international market, which is why the country was largely responsible for making coffee a mass consumption product in the world. Brazil was born, the country of coffee.

Coffee elite contributed to delaying abolition

That boom of coffee multiplied the number of people enslaved in São Paulo. In 1823, there were approximately 21,000 slaves in the state; in 1872 this value increased to 169 thousand.

The coffee economy grew with maximum strength until, in 1850, the slave trade was banned, with the Eusébio de Queirós Law.

Unable to purchase enslaved Africans, the industry had to resort to interprovincial trafficking. The largest concentration of slaves was in the Northeast states, where they worked on sugar cane farms, or in Minas Gerais, because of mining.

With this, a massive migration of slaves began within the country.

The movement sparked a reaction from the Northeastern states, which saw their workforce dwindle. A deputy linked to the sugar elites of Pernambuco and Bahia even proposed a law prohibiting the practice – which was not approved.

Caio Prado Jr. highlights that this dependence on slave labor by the coffee sector was one of the reasons for the delay in abolition in the country.

“This unfavorable situation created for the North will be one of the causes that will make emancipationist ideas mature there more quickly. The Center-South will form the main stronghold of the slave reaction; and with its great relative wealth and powerful political influence, it will become, with the time one of the biggest brakes on the liberation movement”, wrote Prado Jr.

Marquese, a professor at USP, says that, in fact, the São Paulo coffee elite kept people enslaved on their farms until the last moment before abolition and that, as they held great political power, they strongly advocated for maintaining the slave regime until the end.

And advocating, in the case of the coffee elite, did not just mean defending the cause through speech, but effectively influencing government decision-making. According to economist Celso Furtado, the coffee aristocracy differed from the sugar and mining elites due to their effective ability to achieve the objectives that they defined as being in the interest of the category.

“But it is not the fact that they have controlled the government that makes the coffee men unique. It is that they have used this control to achieve perfectly defined policy objectives. It is through this clear awareness of their own interests that they differentiate themselves from other previous or contemporary dominant groups”, writes Furtado in his “Formação Econômica do Brasil”.

Therefore, Brazil’s coffee elite in the 19th century, in addition to remaining enslaved until the last moment, also contributed to the fact that abolition occurred so late – Brazil was the last country on the American continent to abolish slavery.

Only after abolition did European immigrants begin to replace black labor on a large scale in the fields.

Whites still dominate large rural properties

Two centuries after the explosion of the coffee economy in Brazil, the sector continues to be in the hands of white people.

In 2017, for the first time the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) included issues of color and race in the Agricultural Census. The numbers reveal that black and brown people make up the majority of owners of micro rural properties in the country and are a tiny minority among the owners of large farms.

The IBGE does not discriminate the type of product grown, so it is not possible to obtain a specific cut-off for coffee farming. But people in the sector recognize that the coffee scenario does not differ much from the general data revealed by the Census.

According to IBGE, 65% of properties with up to five hectares are black or mixed-race owned, compared to 32.4% white. As the size of farms grows, the proportion of black owners reduces.

Between 5 and 50 hectares, 52.4% belong to white people, against 46.3% to black or mixed-race people. From 50 to 1,000 hectares, 57.1% are managed by white producers, compared to 41.5% by black or mixed-race producers.

In large areas, the disparity intensifies. On properties of 1,000 to 10 thousand hectares, there are more than three times as many white people (74.7%) as there are black or mixed race people (23.8%). In the last range of the research, of more than 10 thousand hectares, the proportion is 79% against 18.9%.

The history of slavery on coffee farms is still something that haunts the sector. Coffee plantations are among the segments with the most cases of people caught in work situations analogous to slavery, according to the Ministry of Labor and Employment.

Coffee cultivation is the fourth economic activity with the most employers on the slave labor dirty list, behind only charcoal production, beef cattle breeding and domestic services.

But the racial disparity does not end with cultivation. There are few black people who occupy leadership positions in the main coffee industrialization companies in Brazil.

Historian Dandara Renault says that the entire anti-racist movement that intensified around the world after the murder of American George Floyd has also reverberated in the coffee world, but still insufficiently. “I see sincere attempts by the market, but they are ineffective,” she says.

This ineffectiveness concerns campaigns or actions designed to convey the image that the organization is facing the problem of lack of diversity, but this is not reflected in concrete actions, such as financial support for black rural producers or the expansion of the group of black leaders. in companies.

Coffee expert Gi Coutinho, one of the pioneers to address the issue of racial diversity in the coffee market, says that the first step to improving this scenario is for companies to recognize that they are not effectively tackling the problem.

From then on, executives need to start implementing inclusion policies beyond speech and advertising.

“This anti-racism needs to be in actions, it needs to be in practice. ‘Ah, there are no black people for me to hire for my brand’. Train black people, give these people opportunities to train,” he says.

O Coffee in the Press sought out the three largest companies in the sector: 3Corações, JDE – owner of brands such as Pilão and L’Or – and Melitta. They were asked whether they have actions to promote black farmers or black people in other stages of the production chain and whether there are black people in the organization’s main leadership positions. None agreed to respond.

Two hundred years after becoming the country of coffee, Brazil continues to ignore the history of slavery on which it built its wealth.

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