Starting Quietly meant moving from ‘coffee roaster for someone else’ to ‘owner and operator’, which continues to be an uncomfortable progression. Working in coffee requires resource extraction, navigating massive corporate agri-business systems, relying on the labour of farm workers, and all kinds of other avenues for imbalances in power and potential exploitation. This tension between trying to make conscious and ethically informed decisions and the inherent impossibility of doing so under capitalism is always bubbling below the surface of buying bags, or working with new producers, or paying my employees. However, it really came to a head with our El Vergel lot this year.
We have partnered with El Vergel farm many times over the last four years, bringing in really fun low-oxygen experimental and unique varietal lots. Within the Specialty industry, their coffee is ubiquitous on big name roaster menus and garnered a lot of attention following their ‘koji’ processing appearing at the 2019 Barista Championship finals. The most recent lot that we locked in was a Pink Bourbon anerobic. While it should have delivered in the late Fall, it never arrived…
So we started a search and in the course of tracking down missing bags, we discovered that both Shady and Elias Bayter from El Vergel were listed in the Panama Papers. It is a leaked database of 11.5 million financial and legal records, which maps out all the offshore companies connected to the Panamanian law firm called Mossack Fonseca. It is an immense web of people, companies, and politicians who used these offshore entities to evade taxes and hide wealth. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) were behind their release and you can find the entire database: here. The more concerning node for El Vergel is: here.
So what does this mean? In practical terms, these links show Elias and Shady as company officers which the ICIJ define as “a person or company who plays a role in an offshore entity”. These roles link upwards to other ‘entities’ like Risto Industrial Inc and Olympus Marketing SA, which in turn connect to any number of ‘intermediaries’ throughout Panama and the British Virgin Islands. The ICIJ defines the later positions as “a go-between for someone seeking an offshore corporation and an offshore service”. In the larger picture, they are documented within a complex system of “corporations that use secret offshore vehicles to legally avoid corporate taxes”(O’Donovan, Wagner & Zeume, 2019). According to publications, like ‘The Value of Offshore Secrets: Evidence from the Panama Papers’, such evasion has a multitude motivations but typically arises from hiding income, tax avoidance, bribery and/or expropriation.
I turned to Shady for an explanation and he states, “in my case, it is a completely legal and registered investment”. He continues, “At the end of the day, Panama Papers was a leak of information from a law office [t]hat worried many people who wanted to keep their investments hidden”. He concludes, “it is not my case because all investments are registered before authorities”. El Vergel’s response illuminates a key part of the Panama Papers, this complex system relies on the creation of offshore companies and is ostensibly legal.
As to the ethical and moral components of hiding wealth or evading taxes, it becomes a bit trickier. Multiple publications about the Panama Papers present the argument that these systems exploit area of “legal ambiguity” (Arlen & Burelli, 2022). In other words, many of the companies and individuals involved in the Panama Papers often abused loopholes in the legal system. In turn, by removing revenue from their proper channels, offshoring undermines “the political order” and compromises the “long term ability [for governments] to function” (ibid, 2022). Often making those involved both “morally blameworthy but politically irresponsible” (ibid, 2022). To the culpability of El Vergel, we are going on their word that they were simply part of the long paper trail. And yet, in the same breath want to quote another producer friend in Colombia who reflects, “the only way to you get rich here is inheriting it, importing it, or stealing it”.
After reviewing all of these documents and Shady’s response, we decided that we did not want the labour behind the coffee to go to waste, so we would release it but provide all of information above. This leads into the second big concern: we have been sitting on this green for a couple months, after it was already delayed in transit. We have tackled aging green previously (How Long Does Green Stay Fresh?) with the takeaway being there is a flattening effect to green coffee’s aromatics and flavour attributes over time. It is a slow but unrelenting breakdown of glucose, fructose, amino acids, and other minor sugars that culminates in ‘baggy’ notes which land someplace between cardboard and wood (Selmar, Gerhard Bytof & Knopp, 2007). Historically, one of the key advantages of a dark roast was hiding a coffee’s age but this is much harder to do with lighter roasting styles.
The good news is that our El Vergel lot is still tasting bright and sweet with lots of berry and melon. Naturally and semi-washed coffees generally have a better shelf life, which is useful given this lot’s anerobic natural preparation. However, it remains a menu outlier because it is about 8 months older than its counterparts. Our coffees are always fresh and by focusing on the highly seasonal, we can celebrate coffee at its peak. I decided beyond being open about the potentially dubious connections in the Panama Papers, we should also make it clear on the label about this lot’s delay. Thus, we went a ‘passage of time’ taste note. It might seem like a bad business approach given the coffee tastes delicious and El Vergel is such a big name in coffee with many fans of their experimental preparations so why do this? Actual tangible transparency seems important…
There is a prevalent idea in Specialty Coffee that we do better than the previous exploitative models from coffee’s long colonial history. However, one of my lessons in this El Vergel saga has been that you can follow the ‘Third Wave’ values of direct trade with farm level engagement and high price points for coffee but you can still fall into the age old traps. A quick web search for El Vergel will bring up many of the major specialty roasters, be it the Barn or Onyx or Gardelli, and it speaks to the way things are scaling. While rely on the guise of small, ethically-minded, and transparent by crowding under third wave banner, the reality is that both increasingly massive and ethically diluted operations rule on the both the roaster and farm side of the industry.
French Philosopher Alain Badiou argues that life under Capitalism is “a brutal state of affairs” in which “all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone” and wealth “is presented to us as the ideal” (2002). However, given the inequality and brutality connected to this “established order”, we cannot “call it ideal or wonderful” and “instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible”. He cites the often repeated notions that “our democracy is not perfect. But it’s better than the bloody dictatorships”. It becomes a defence of our current state of affairs as we can consistently “say that real evil is elsewhere”. He illustrates with the examples “we let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don’t cut their throats with machetes”.
By saying we are ‘doing better’ in coffee because we are not as bad as previous models or systems of exploitation relies on the deferral trick that Badiou outlines. Sure large scale specialty roasters are big, but not as big as nestle. Yes, this ‘farm’ is actually a large scale agri-buisness company but it is direct trade and their experimental processed lots are very small and special, which makes it like a smallholder farm! For Badiou, “it is necessary to reconstruct rights, in everyday life as in politics, of truth and of the good”. I am not sure what that looks like in a industry in which wealth is consolidating, smallholder farms struggle to reach market, labour is exploited, and producers live in a perpetually precarious state. For Quietly, I think it is simple: we do not hide behind marketing and just be honest with our decisions and choices. In other words, we just keep trying to lose well…
Works Cited
Arlen, Gordon, and Carlo Burelli. “Getting Real about Taxes: Offshore Tax Sheltering and Realism’s Ethic of Responsibility.” Ethics & International Affairs, 36. 2, (2022): 231–258.
Badiou, Alain, Christoph Cox & Molly Whalen. “On Evil: An Interview with Alain Badiou”. Cabinet. Winter (2001–2002).
Chohan, Usman. “The Panama Papers and Tax Morality”. Emerging Market Fiscal Oversite and Governance Mechanisms (2006).
O’Donovan, James, Hannes F Wagner & Stefan Zeume. “The Value of Offshore Secrets: Evidence from the Panama Papers”. The Review of Financial Studies, 32.11 (2019): 4117–4155.
Selmar, Dirk et al. “The storage of green coffee (Coffea arabica): decrease of viability and changes of potential aroma precursors.” Annals of Botany, 101.1 (2008): 31-8.
Lee Knuttila 