Hard wheat was not the only interesting crop to have its center of origin in Ethiopia. Coffea arabica also migrated originally from the Ethiopian plateau to the mountains of Yemen and from there into all the other important coffee production areas of the world. Indeed, Italian agronomists were quick to identify coffee as one of the few safe sources of revenues of the new colony.[20] Already before the Italian invasion, 80 percent of the Ethiopian coffee production was being exported and constituted the only major agriculture export of the country.[21] If wheat proved essential to feed the colonial army and the builders of the colonial infrastructure, coffee was the main commodity that enabled Italians to dream of Ethiopia as an important source of revenue. In an alternative formulation, wheat was important so that coffee could be cultivated. Acknowledging the scarcity of data concerning the concrete situation of coffee production in Ethiopia, agriculture experts estimated the total of exports in 1936 to be able to cover a third of Italy’s consumption. In spite of their lack of detailed information, they insisted on the importance of understanding that aggregated production numbers referred to clearly differentiated local realities.
In the eastern regions, in the Harar and the Arussi, there were a few large coffee plantations—some as large as 1,500 hectares—owned by Europeans who bought the properties before Italian occupation and were based on intensive use of wage native labor. These large capitalist operations were surrounded by a multitude of small plots of independent indigenous coffee cultivators. In the valley of the Errer near the capital of the region—Harar, the center of Islamic culture and religion in the Horn of Africa—there were about 10,000 of these small coffee native growers.[22] The coffee type produced in this eastern part of the Ethiopian highlands was the Harari, with characteristically large grains, long shape, and slightly green color. The Harari was the result of the historical transplantation undertaken by Arabs of wild plants from the western parts of the territory, the center of origin of the Arabica, into the valley of the Errer. Italians, in their obsession with condemning the Negus rule, blamed the Abyssinian invasion of the area in 1887 for being responsible for the destruction of many of these Arab coffee plots and their replacement by barley, “thus substituting a rich and promising culture with a poorer one.”[23]
In the west, in the Galla-Sidamo region, conditions were very different. Coffee cultivation here was described as not being far from a recollection activity taking advantage of the profusion of wild plants in the area. This was after all coffee’s center of origin, “an immense region in which coffee inhabits the slopes and the bottom of the valleys between 1,500 and 2,500m above sea-level…. [It] constitutes the most beautiful coffee park in the entire world.”[24] The types produced were the Caffa (from which the word ‘coffee’ derives) and the Ennara, usually sold in international markets as Abyssinian coffee, and that reached much higher values than the Harari.
The diversity of situations posed different challenges to the Italian agricultural scientists arrived in 1936 trusted with the task of increasing Ethiopian production. They had to deal with native populations collecting coffee from the forest in the west; decaying productions by small native cultivators in the east; a few large European capitalist plantations; inexperienced Italian peasants who had no previous knowledge of coffee culture coming into new settlement schemes. Indeed, although coffee is usually associated with the plantation system as was then practiced in Brazil—large monocrop fields making intense use of wage labor—in Ethiopia it should also contribute to make polycultural small white settlements economically viable. As Maugini noted, “the settler didn’t come to Africa to have a miserable life and limit himself to survive. He must, naturally, find the ways to constitute the savings that justify the difficulties he faces.”[25] Coffee embodied for the white settler the promise of a way out of the miserable peasant life of metropolitan Italy. But of course, in Maugini’s view, he couldn’t dispense with the expertise of breeders to make significant progress. To summarize, coffee production condensed all different forms of colonial practices in the territory: capitalist colonization in the form of large plantations, with lands granted to white investors and native populations used as cheap wage labor; settler colonization—Maugini’s preferred type of colonization—with large-scale transfers of peasants from impoverished and overpopulated regions of Italy to farm the lands of the Empire in small holds; natives mobilized to cultivate their own plots of land with cash crops and integrated in the imperial economy.
Edoardo Carlo Branzanti from Maugini’s Florence Colonial Agriculture Institute, later to be a member of the Ispettorato Agrario of the AOI at the capital Addis Ababa, was the scientist responsible for defining the program of coffee research in Abyssinia. This program would constitute the basis for the work undertaken at the experimental post of Malcó established, not surprisingly, in the western region of Galla and Sidamo to take advantage of the area condition as coffee’s center of origin.[26] The problems limiting the productivity of natives’ plots were obvious for Branzanti. In the east, cultivators seldom pruned their plants leading to asymmetrical trees with asymmetrical morphologic, physiologic, and production characteristics, making harvesting more complicated as well. In the west, things were even worse with total absence of pruning and the development of excessively tall plants with long thin branches. To the lack of horticultural care one had to add the habit of delaying picking season to reduce labor, thus leaving the fruit to dry in the tree itself or, even worse, picking it from the soil which produced the bad earth taste typical of low-quality coffee.[27] The grim picture offered by Italian experts of local practices also included the non-standardized procedure of drying fruits, mixing green ones with those already dried in the tree, as well as poor extraction methods unable to sufficiently remove impurities from coffee beans. At Malcó, agricultural trials should identify the best practices to be used in the plots of the natives, as well as in those of the Italian settlers.
But the major effort was directed at changing the plants themselves. For Branzanti there was no more pernicious practice than that of the Galla and Sidamo natives of cultivating their plots with coffee plants taken directly from the forest or with seeds collected randomly.[28] This explained the great heterogeneity observable in the fields of local peasants, with a great mess of types with different properties concerning yield, maturation, or size of beans, leading to great oscillations in productivity as well as laborious preparation processes. The most important task of a program for increasing coffee production in Ethiopia was allegedly to distribute among cultivators, indigenous or white, homogeneous plants produced by plant breeders at Malcó. In subsequent years, the main activity at Malcó was thus to identify the best-producing coffee plants by their resistance to pests, distribution of flowers and maturation period, annual production of beans, and form and color of seeds.[29] The best exemplars were then to be multiplied in nurseries that should supply coffee cultivators’ plots.
20
Chiudero and Rochetti, “L’ Avvaloramento in Etiopia,” p. 311; Cifferi,
22
Italo Paviolo,
25
Armando Maugini,
26
Edoardo Carlo Branzanti, “Linee Programmatiche per la Sperimentazioni sul caffè in Abissinia,” Archivo Istituto Agronomico per l’Oltremare (AIAO), fasc. 1233.
27
Edoardo Carlo Brazanti,
29
“Relazione sull’ attivitá svolta nel vivaio e campo dimostrativo di Malcó durante l’anno 1939,” Real Governo del Galla e Sidama, January 1940, AIAO, fasc. 1817.