Uncommon Grounds : The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by Mark Pendergrast

Author:Mark Pendergrast
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2019-08-14T23:00:00+00:00

1941: Surviving the First Quota Year

The first year of the agreement, which ran retrospectively from October 1, 1940 (when the new Brazilian harvest began to arrive in the United States), through September 30, 1941, was marked by controversy and uneasy compromise. In the first few months of 1941, coffee prices rose swiftly in response to the newly signed agreement. At first American coffee companies weren’t alarmed. W. F. Williamson, secretary of the National Coffee Association, put it succinctly: “The American consumer does not require, and will not insist on having coffee at prices which mean bankruptcy to Latin American producing countries.” Business Week noted that higher coffee prices would “cushion the impact of the war on the economy of Latin American countries,” while allowing them to purchase more goods from U.S. manufacturers.

By June prices had nearly doubled from their lows of the previous year. At the Coffee Board meetings of the Inter-American Coffee Agreement, the producing countries resisted the suggestion put forward by American representative Paul Daniels to increase the quotas. Both Brazil and Colombia flouted Daniels’s request by increasing the official minimum price at which they would sell their coffees.

Leon Henderson, head of the newly created U.S. Office of Price Administration (OPA), took notice. The New Deal advocate had never approved of the coffee quota agreement. In July, when Brazil announced another minimum-price increase, Henderson blew up. “The unmistakable attitude of the producing countries to date,” Henderson wrote, was: “‘Here is a chance to make a killing.’” He threatened to suspend the quota agreement. Daniels subsequently invoked the right of the United States under the coffee agreement unilaterally to increase the various quotas without the consent of the producers. On August 11 quotas were officially increased by 20 percent. The ploy worked, as prices began to subside.

In spite of numerous problems, the coffee agreement saved the Latin American coffee industry, and relations between the United States and Latin America seldom had been more amicable. During 1941, per-capita coffee consumption in the United States had risen to sixteen and a half pounds—a new record.

In December six Latin American “coffee queens,” funded by their governments, arrived in New York for a triumphant U.S. tour. Eleanor Roosevelt hosted them on her show, Over Our Coffee Cups, which stressed the theme, “Get More Out of Life With Coffee.” The coffee queens were scheduled to appear at the Waldorf Astoria a week later for a grand Coffee Ball—but the Japanese upstaged them.

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