Demythologising the history of coffee in Lipa, Batangas in the XIXth century

Abstract

There is no article dealing with the history of Philippine coffee that does not mention 'the grandeur that was Lipa', a prosperous period that began with a coffee boom in the late 1800's and ended with the coffee blight of c1889. Most references adopt a monocausal approach to the rise and fall of coffee in Lipa, Batangas in the end of the nineteenth century. That is, c1886-87, an airborne fungus having attacked and destroyed all the coffee plantations in the neighbouring Southeast Asian coffee regions, supposedly left Lipa as the sole supplier of coIfee beans to the world. Upa is said to have profited greatly from this alleged coIfee monopoly until c1889 when the same fungus finally infected even the Upa plantations, bringing the hugely luaative coffee industry to an abrupt end. This view has remained unchalenged for almost a century. By casting a wider net to include primary sources such as travelogues and government reports, plus several key htstoncal studies, this research subjects the arrival, rise and decline of coffee in Upa to scrutiny and concludes that what currently passes for history is more apocrypha! than it is fadllal, dominated as it is by myths and half-truths. Viewing coffee in the broader context of the work! economy. this paper dismisses the supposed c1886 monopoly as myth and argues that the coffee boom towards the end of the Spanish colonia! era can be attributed to a complex series of events and antecedents and was ultimately a response to the pressures of global demand. It also argues that the seeds of the collapse of the industry were planted long before the coffee crisis of 1869-1892. Other factors such as diminishing virgin forest, monocullure, the lack of investments, and competition with other products, were probably more to blame. Possibly, the arrival of the coffee blight may have accelerated the inevitable. but was not the prime cause. This new approach to the rise and decline of coffee in Ups reveats a history more complex than was previously thought and is a dramatic demonstration of the transforming power of gounnandism and nineteenth century globalisation.