[HN Gopher] Kenya and "the decline of the greatest coffee" (2021)
___________________________________________________________________
Kenya and "the decline of the greatest coffee" (2021)
Author : sebg
Score : 148 points
Date : 2024-12-02 14:02 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (christopherferan.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (christopherferan.com)
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I wonder what the long term solutions to these kinds of problems
| are in East Africa and similar contexts.
|
| 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.
| fsckboy wrote:
| "the remnants of colonialism" include the ability to
| participate in world markets which create markets for local
| products. If Kenyans grew coffee (ignoring the fact that
| Kenyans growing coffee was itself a remnant of colonialism)
| just for the Kenyan market, the coffee sector in Kenya would be
| a tiny part of the local economy.
|
| 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.
| busterarm wrote:
| It's painful having to remind people of this.
|
| 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.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| busterarm wrote:
| Violent conflict between human beings is inevitable. It
| stems from our conflict with nature.
|
| We're all winners here and that's far better than the
| alternative.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You have to work with the world as it is, not as you'd
| wish it to work (especially that it likely couldn't
| possibly work that way anyway). "State of nature" sucks,
| because nature sucks. All the nice and good things come
| from building systems, social or otherwise, on top of the
| natural state of things - systems that work with our
| natural inclinations, instead of pretending they don't
| exist.
| meiraleal wrote:
| Surviving industrial level mass-enslavement is now
| considered the winning side of colonialism or you still
| don't consider native Americans and African descendants as
| people?
| asdff wrote:
| Well surviving it till today sure beats being part of a
| lineage that was snuffed out by some evil slave owner in
| 1846.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| Sure, but when the uber-wealthy capitalists make the laws,
| avoid paying the taxes that support the entire system, and
| then greedily take as much as possible for their own selves
| without regard to the well-being of the workers or the Earth,
| the parasite is overwhelming the host.
|
| 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.
| vundercind wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| n4r9 wrote:
| These days anti-trust measures tend to be framed in terms
| of increasing competition rather than market freeness.
| Which does make some sense. Hard to argue with increasing
| competition unless you're Peter Thiel.
| vundercind wrote:
| Increasing competition _is_ increasing freedom to
| _participate in_ a market, which is the kind of market
| freedom that matters when it comes to "free markets".
|
| 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)
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Do you think by "remnants of colonialism" the OP meant
| "capitalism"? It's plain to me that he did not. I read it as
| him meaning an extensive bureaucracy designed to control the
| subject population is still in place and causing the price of
| the good to rise while the actual people who produce and
| innovate the product are left out of sharing in the windfall.
|
| 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.
| solidsnack9000 wrote:
| The global market we have today is the result of an
| ordering of things that is a remnant of colonialism -- I
| think that is what fsckboy is referring to. It could have
| happened another way; but the particular one we have
| happened this way.
|
| 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.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I agree in general, however when you actually interact with
| these places you soon realise that the markets are completely
| skewed by corrupt practices of various kinds (not just cash
| bribery). I don't know whether you've ever been to Kenya or
| anywhere else in East Africa but it's obvious how things work
| after just a short time there.
|
| 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.
| thrance wrote:
| You'd have to be foolish or blind to not see how the
| ditribution of wealth in our current world closely follows
| what it was under colonialism. Sorry, but colonialism was a
| net negative for Kenyans and many other.
|
| 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.
| potamic wrote:
| Except the middlemen in this case have continued through from
| the colonial period, with seemingly little competition since.
| And it's also mandated that you can sell only through the
| middlemen and not independently, and you start to wonder if
| they're just bribing politicians to keep the system rigged in
| their favour.
| asdff wrote:
| They do bribe the system, its called lobbying and is legal
| in most all countries.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It may be surprising for you, but it's very rare for it
| to be legal.
|
| 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.
| solidsnack9000 wrote:
| The hard truth is that the combination of institutions that
| are the remnants of colonialism have a lot to do with
| unprecedented improvement in material well-being all over the
| world, over the last 400 years or so.
|
| 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.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Yay - I can't _wait_ for Pax Sinica to do away with the
| inefficiencies of democracy if it means more suffering
| humans will be uplifted. A brief period of reeducation is
| worth the amazing infrastructure and getting things done.
| The end will justify the means, right? /s
|
| 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.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| All of our problems are caused by our not prioritizing
| compassion in our systems' designs and implementations,
| including how our economic transactions are structured and
| performed.
|
| 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.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| The problem is capitalism cannot function without an
| underclass, and while each capitalist country itself harbors
| an underclass that is brutally exploited, the countries
| themselves also become effectively an underclass too on the
| global stage, specifically the global south or the
| "developing world." Many of these countries are being
| exploited in one way or another, either by way of shady
| finance dealings that saddle them with untenable debt, which
| they must satisfy by selling their resources to western
| corpos at rock bottom prices, or via trade deals that
| inherently favor the western nations. The only countries I'm
| aware of that managed to avoid this trap in a big way were
| South Korea, which effectively created incubators for their
| home industries to grow in without needing to contend with
| the world market until they were in a fit state to do so, and
| China, which effectively is one giant state-run corporation.
|
| 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.
| asdff wrote:
| While true, at one time within the memory of people alive
| today, that underclass in this country could afford homes
| with their paycheck from widely available unskilled work.
| Capitalism may need an unskilled class of workers to work,
| but paying them like crap is not necessary as we've seen
| here in the US and seemed to have forgotten over the
| generations.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I mean, that's just late stage capitalism. Growth is
| required, every revenue stream must have all slack taken
| out of it. Any money left in the market is inefficiency
| which capitalism inherently rewards those who can remove
| inefficiencies. A perfectly balanced market means that
| every exploitable dollar is, in fact, exploited, which
| means the poors can't have anything. Whatever money must
| be paid to them must be then recouped.
|
| 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.
| asdff wrote:
| You forget that there is value in having moneyed
| consumers. You can sell them more things that cost more
| money than you could poor consumers. Arguably when you
| empower a doctors and lawyers class driving bmws and
| buying flights to aspen, they are spending proportionally
| more of their money in the economy than the billionaire
| class ahead of them that would have sat on this money if
| they extracted it by now and dumped it into gold bonds
| and land or something stupid like that instead of
| something that generates actual economic activity. And if
| you had them so poor they could barely afford food then
| there would be no BMW and no Aspen.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I don't disagree with you in the slightest, but I'm not
| in charge here, and our current batch of elites in power
| seem content to coast out the collapse, pocketing every
| dollar they can as the world crumbles around them. I
| don't personally think it's a good long term plan, and to
| be fair, numerous economists and even billionaires have
| come out saying that the world is not in a good way. But
| they still use their power to maintain the status quo and
| not foster badly needed change, so it's difficult to
| assess to what degree this is legitimate thought on their
| part, or simply saying what they know will sound good as
| they eagerly continue stockpiling unconscionable amounts
| of wealth.
|
| 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.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > as they eagerly continue stockpiling unconscionable
| amounts of wealth
|
| 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.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > You forget that there is value in having moneyed
| consumers. You can sell them more things that cost more
| money than you could poor consumers.
|
| 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.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > While true, at one time within the memory of people
| alive today, that underclass in this country could afford
| homes with their paycheck from widely available unskilled
| work
|
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >While true, at one time within the memory of people
| alive today, that underclass in this country could afford
| homes with their paycheck from widely available unskilled
| work
|
| The underclass? Or the WHITE MALE underclass?
| animal_spirits wrote:
| I admire where your heart is at, it's wonderful to see that
| empathy has a large role in your life. Although I encourage
| you to look deeper at where compassion comes from. There are
| people in my family who believe being gay will commit your
| afterlife to eternal torture, and it is their compassion that
| compels them to act in intolerance of people's choice to
| love.
|
| 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.
| s5300 wrote:
| >>There are people in my family who believe being gay will
| commit your afterlife to eternal torture, and it is their
| compassion that compels them to act in intolerance of
| people's choice to love.
|
| 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.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| It is truly sad, my friend, that you have to deal with
| misguided people who believe their religiosity is enough to
| countermand the Greatest Command(ment): "To love God with
| all your being, and then to love your neighbor as
| yourself."
|
| 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.
| unitolle wrote:
| > 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
|
| 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.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| That's very interesting.
|
| 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.
| greentxt wrote:
| The solution to amoral familialism?
| returningfory2 wrote:
| While it's true that these systems are a holdover from
| colonialism, it's also true that Kenya has been an independent
| country for over 50 years with sovereignty and agency over
| internal affairs like how the coffee market works. I feel at
| some point the blame needs to be shifted accordingly.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > with sovereignty and agency over internal affairs like how
| the coffee market works
|
| 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.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| The article (if I'm reading it right) is placing the blame
| on how the government of Kenya restricts its coffee market
| (e.g. only allowing a small number of export licenses).
| It's about internal laws. The government of Kenya has the
| agency to change these.
| jujube3 wrote:
| Over 60 years, actually. The coffee industry is regulated the
| way it is in Kenya because the current government wants it to
| work that way, not because of "colonialism."
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You are arguing against people's religious beliefs about why
| the world looks like it does. Logic or reason will not be of
| any use. No matter what bad things happens in the coming one
| hundred or one thousand years, it will never be the fault of
| the people that the religion has designated as holy victims,
| and it will always be the fault of the people that the
| religion has designated as evil oppressors.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| There's an episode of Omnivore about coffee, going from farm in
| Rwanda to coffee shop in the USA and addresses these
| challenges.
| levocardia wrote:
| Some countries in Africa are certainly "stuck" but Kenya is
| actually doing pretty well overall [1]. Per capita GDP is about
| where South Korea was in 1969, or India in 2018, and Kenya's
| economy has been growing pretty steadily since one-party rule
| ended circa 2002.
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDKEN
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Perversely enough, consolidation of production into 'big agra'
| and mechanized might be the best play to disrupt the existing
| system for something more efficient and less stagnant. There
| are myriad paths to get to said endpoint however, not all of
| them equal. I don't expect said path to go well for
| smallholders by definition, though even though the survivors
| would no longer qualify as smallholders for one reason or the
| other.
|
| 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'.
| philip1209 wrote:
| Tim Wendelboe (perhaps the greatest coffee roaster) has been
| talking about this on his latest Q&A podcast. A rigmarole for
| exports plus climate change are causing issues.
|
| 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-...
| pvg wrote:
| I know nothing about coffee roasting but the level of wankery
| on that site is an absolute delight. Makes me wonder if this is
| deliberate
|
| https://timwendelboe.no/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/T_Wendelb...
|
| https://www.gottahaverockandroll.com/ItemImages/000025/jul18...
| goosejuice wrote:
| Of all the speciality foods, wine is the most pretentious.
| Coffee isn't far behind.
| debacle wrote:
| There's different varieties of coffee wanker.
|
| 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.
| roflyear wrote:
| Most local roasters really are garbage, though. Telling
| people to do this will make sure that people miss out on
| a lot of what "coffee can be" and will end up with
| something that is probably better than the worst of the
| worst coffee, but still tastes pretty awful in comparison
| to a great coffee roasted adequately.
|
| "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.
| debacle wrote:
| True. The most popular local bean in my area tastes like
| battery acid, but there's a roaster about 20 minutes from
| me who is only ~20% more expensive than Lavazza (my go to
| large roaster) who produces a variety of good roasts.
|
| 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.
| rozap wrote:
| Beer is close. The essay written on the side of a floodland
| bottle is really a sight to behold in the wankery domain.
| pvg wrote:
| An argument can be made for beer being above, perhaps
| even the peak. Unlike coffee or wine, beerwankers took
| something that didn't really have a high-end and then
| made it up. They created their own wanktopic! And for
| this achievement, they get comparatively little of their
| due social opprobrium - 'homebrew' has come to connote
| scrappy and hip even though it's transparent wankery of
| the highest order.
| jujube3 wrote:
| "homebrew" just means you made it yourself. nothing to do
| with snobbery.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I'm not a linguist but I think this bit of jargon leaked
| into tech from ham radio, which is old enough that
| "homebrew" (in the sense of building your own radio set
| from components) referred to a still-earlier time when
| people actually did commonly brew their own beer at home.
| "homespun" retains a similar meaning in general usage.
| jujube3 wrote:
| Is beer part of "tech" now?
|
| homebrew has a pretty straightforward meaning... beer you
| brewed at home. It's actually legally defined that way
| too
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Maybe I've misunderstood pvg upthread but I assumed
| "'homebrew' has come to connote scrappy and hip" was
| about IT/tech because it doesn't have that connotation in
| the actual context of beer, at least to my knowledge.
| pvg wrote:
| No, you had it right - e.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club
| which, as you say, is probably a borrowing from older
| tech nerd communities.
| polairscience wrote:
| I know a lot about coffee roasting and can say that your
| wankery meter is on point. Calling someone "likely the best
| coffee roaster" is like calling someone "likely the best wine
| maker". It's something that people reach for via wankery to
| get clout. It's not actually something you can asses via
| reasonable metrics.
|
| 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.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Sounds like they need a futures market. This allows producers to
| sell their crop to traders earlier so they don't have to wait for
| final export. In addition more law and order to protect those
| markets from the mills that are skimming.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Government is restricting export licenses (only nine are
| issued), effectively creating an oligopoly/cartel leading to a
| chain of grift and lack of transparency all the way down.
| greenavocado wrote:
| It's 99% corruption and stupidity. The system is pretty
| convoluted, with multiple layers of middlemen taking a cut before
| the coffee reaches the international market. The auction system
| with multiple middlemen and commissions complicates the supply
| chain, reduces transparency, and delays payments to farmers,
| discouraging investments in quality. Marketing agents paying
| allowances to cooperative board members to secure business is a
| form of corruption that undermines fair trade practices and leads
| to quality neglect. Despite buyers paying premiums for quality,
| improvements in processing facilities aren't being made. So, even
| if farmers are trying to produce high-quality coffee, the
| facilities might not be up to par to handle it properly. The
| absence of direct relationships between buyers and farmers makes
| it difficult to hold anybody accountable for quality. The
| discontinuation of traditional processing methods like double
| washing, likely due to reduced volumes, may be contributing to
| quality decline. High financing costs and delayed payments make
| it challenging for farmers to maintain high-quality standards.
| The lack of reforms in the coffee export system perpetuates the
| current problematic structure. It's 99% corruption and stupidity.
| nathancahill wrote:
| SEY is a roaster that's pushing back on these things, in
| addition to having fantastic coffee. They have a very detailed
| breakdown of costs and value-add at every step along the way
| from farm to roaster.
| MKoberger wrote:
| This was such a fascinating read--it really resonated with me. A
| few years ago, my girlfriend and I started a small coffee shop in
| Hanoi as a fun side project, and I was struck by the parallels
| between Vietnam's coffee history and the issues you outline here
| about Kenya.
|
| 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!
| paulette449 wrote:
| > A few years ago, my girlfriend and I started a small coffee
| shop in Hanoi as a fun side project
|
| Did it end up being the fun side project you expected?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Having done something similar in India I can say it
| definitely was fun. What makes it fun is there are next to no
| regulations so you can plop down in a place one day and just
| sell food.
| 9dev wrote:
| Hah, try that in Germany. You shouldn't even be giving food
| a sideways glance without your permits at hand. And don't
| you dare to even consider selling beer alongside your
| snacks.
| timdiggerm wrote:
| I wonder why
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| Yes but in Germany food is safe. In India? Heck no. There
| is a reason for all regulations.
| silisili wrote:
| Is it similar to the US in that in theory you need a ton
| of permits, but in reality everyone kinda turns a blind
| eye to it unless you get too big/at a big venue?
|
| 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.
| dehrmann wrote:
| The standard insight is there's a difference between liking
| coffee, liking hanging out in a coffee shop, and _running_ a
| coffee shop. Running a coffee shop is 98% HR, accounting, and
| customer service, and 2% coffee.
| glimshe wrote:
| Not very different from running a game company!
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Running a game company is more than 2% coffee :)
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Sounds like there's room for innovation. Perhaps a
| teetotaller game studio where only tea, water, maybe some
| juices, are accepted.
| throwup238 wrote:
| That's how you get Star Citizen.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Or any other "passion" or hobby that you try to turn into
| a business. You end up spending the vast majority of your
| time on the business, and very little on the thing you
| once enjoyed.
| retinaros wrote:
| All the vietnamese coffee that I tried in europe (even in hype
| shops) tasted like american "french" roast aka burnt bad
| coffee. Could you recommend ways to try nice coffees from
| vietnam?
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Find another roaster that doesn't burn it?
|
| 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.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| The problem is if it is bad, they have to burn it to mask
| the taste. Same with most meats too.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| I don't follow - how do you mask a bad taste (bad coffee)
| with a bad taste (burned coffee)? I.e. if it's going to
| taste bad then use a lighter roast, cheaper and faster
| anyway.
| kdmtctl wrote:
| One could pretend that beans are intentionally burned,
| "The Vietnamese Way", regardless of the source material
| quality. Lighter roast would differ from batch to batch
| with varying not-so-good taste, but charcoal is always a
| charcoal.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Burnt coffee taste like burnt coffee. Vietnamese drink
| coffee with 1/4 can of condensed milk in it.
|
| 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.
| searealist wrote:
| This is a common cliche in the hipster coffee community.
| The truth is darker roasts change the acid profile of
| coffee, and many people prefer that taste. To them,
| drinking a "good" coffee is like drinking a "bad" coffee
| with a lemon squeezed into it.
| a012 wrote:
| > All the vietnamese coffee ... "french" roast aka burnt bad
| coffee
|
| 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?
| alephnerd wrote:
| Taste preferences are different too.
|
| 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.
|
| [0] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-66167222
| taeric wrote:
| It really has gotten to the point that different coffee
| should be treated as different teas. Nobody expect that
| the different teas should taste the same. For some
| reason, the expectation is largely that coffee should be
| coffee.
|
| And, it is mind bending for some folks to hear that I
| abhor the taste of arabica coffee. It is so so bad.
| bryananderson wrote:
| "Go to Vietnam" is maybe not the most practical suggestion
| for grabbing a cup of coffee, but that's where I found the
| best Vietnamese coffee.
|
| 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.
| charlysl wrote:
| It was the DDR who developed the modern Vietnamese coffee
| industry, collapsing before it could benefit.
|
| _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._
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_German_coffee_crisis
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This was an awesome read.
|
| I never knew what my coffee went through.
|
| The Ugandan coffee was really good.
| bvrmn wrote:
| By the end of 2024 Kenya is still best "safe" option to buy beans
| from unknown roastery. In my opinion of course.
| NickC25 wrote:
| This was tough to read.
|
| 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 $$$ for at Starbucks
| to absolute shame.
| roflyear wrote:
| What roasters are you buying from?
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| I haven't had the chance to have coffee in Kenya, but I would
| note that most serious coffee places in the US also "puts the
| crap Americans pay $$$ 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.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Starbucks problem isn't consistency it's their roast is too
| dark,
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| The roast is too dark to _provide consistency_.
|
| 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).
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| And one of the reasons their roast is too dark is that it's
| easier to be consistent that way, which is the point being
| made.
| lukasb wrote:
| I've gotten good Kenyan recently from Flower Child.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| 1. Someone reaches mastery in a craft
|
| 2. A community of enthusiasts grows around that
|
| 3. Craftsmen make money
|
| 4. Business people hear about people making money. They acquire
| the operation
|
| 5. New owners maximize profits by looking for ways to reduce
| costs, usually reducing quality
|
| 6. Product becomes inferior, brand becomes irrelevant
|
| 7. The only people left buying the products are aficionados that
| cannot distinguish quality
|
| 8. Go to 1
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