There are surprisingly few first-rate analyses of the place of a particular crop in the economic and cultural history of a Latin American country. Professor Hall, setting her sights on coffee and its role in the transformation of the Costa Rican landscape and society, has produced a little jewel of a study, a remarkably insightful, tightly written and exhaustively documented interpretation that should stand as a model for future researchers. The author, presently on the staff of the University of Costa Rica, has drawn more widely, one suspects, on national and family archives, newspapers, and ephemera than any non-Tico scholar who has ever written about republican Costa Rica. As a geographer her concern is as much with spatial distributions as with historical sequences and their economic and social consequences. This is reflected in the almost fifty original maps depicting the evolution of land-use patterns that handsomely supplement the text.
Coffee was established as a commercial crop in Costa Rica well before it acquired similar importance in other Central American countries. There were no aboriginal communities that had to be removed from the land before coffee planting could commence, and there were not any other previously established commercial crops to compete with. The difficulty of access to the central highlands had largely insulated Costa Rica from the destructive political disturbances that so wrecked the other countries of the isthmus in the nineteenth century. Finally, it was in the area around San José, ecologically best suited for coffee, that the majority of the small European population was to be found.
Although known as a garden curiosity for several decades, coffee had only begun to replace sugar and pasture on the Meseta Central around San José in the 1840s. By the turn of the century a coffee monoculture had evolved here that occupied virtually all the land between the 800 and 1,500 meter contours. Despite the orientation to the European market most of the crop has always moved through the Pacific port of Puntarenas rather than to the Atlantic, where route development came later and storage conditions were less favorable. In the last years of the nineteenth century there was an expansion of plantings into the Alajuela-San Ramón area, favored by established transport services and proximity to an export port. The colonization of the Reventazón and Turrialba valleys to the east of the continental divide came with completion of the Atlantic railroad. Here, however, large haciendas were dominant, with sugar cane and bananas of equal importance to coffee. Turrialba came to be the central place for this zone, while elsewhere in the Valle Central a network of modest-sized towns (e.g. Heredia, Alajuela, San Ramón, Barba) evolved as service centers for the campesinos. But the processing of the coffee bean was essentially a rural activity and this, with the characteristic fragmentation of holdings, favored the dispersed rural settlement pattern that still gives the Costa Rica highlands a distinctive aspect.
The last forty years has seen the establishment of coffee growing in many peripheral areas beyond the Valle Central as the settlement frontiers of Costa Rica have been pushed outward, facilitated by the construction of new highways and modern coffee beneficiating plants. But ecological conditions for the crop ouside the central volcanic highlands generally have been inferior, so that coffee culture there has proved profitable only when world prices were high.
Coffee’s early establishment as the dominant export crop gave it an exaggerated influence in the country’s subsequent development. As a consequence of early successes, Hall argues, the illusion was created among the population that coffee alone could bring rapid and permanent prosperity. The concentration of plantings in the center of the country, around the capital city, reinforced this confidence in coffee as the grano de oro. Colonists seeking new lands to clear were attracted to those regions where good coffee harvests could be expected. Nowhere in Costa Rica has coffee been replaced by other crops and this, too, had contributed to the deeply rooted “coffee mentality.”
The author seeks to relate the disappointingly slow rate of development of the Costa Rican economy to this historical dependence on a single crop. In this she is somewhat less convincing than in the rest of her analysis. Clearly the chronic instability of coffee prices, and hence, instability in foreign exchange earnings, has hurt badly. Writing in 1973, in a period of excess production and low world prices, the case undoubtedly seemed more compelling to her than it might have three years later, when “strictly hard bean” Costa Rica coffee was again bringing near record prices in the marketplace. Under such conditions the call for agricultural diversification is likely to attract little attention.
For better or for worse, the impact of coffee on Costa Rica has been decisive. It covers fifteen percent of the productive cropland; nearly forty percent of the rural population lives within the coffeegrowing areas. After 1950 a campaign was mounted to rehabilitate the coffee industry through replanting with high-yielding hybrids, closer planting, reduced use of shade, and increased applications of commercial fertilizers. More recently the cooperative movement has become prominent, especially bolstering the condition of smaller producers on marginal lands. Production is continuing to increase.
This little book is written with uncommon ease and authority. For anyone who is at all familiar with Costa Rica, or with coffee growing or the coffee trade, it should provide absorbing reading.
