The cozy relationship worked out between USAID, Starbuck's, and the ever-present Indonesian military seemed like the perfect Third World deal. So when it looked like East Timor might drift toward independence as a result of political changes in Jakarta, the Clinton administration got worried. So did Starbucks. According to Business Week, the coffee company received the entire 1998 crop of East Timor's coffee, said to be worth around $20 million. The 1999 yield was estimated to be a record-setting bumper crop, worth some $100 million.
Although the Indonesian military officially got out of the coffee business in East Timor, its top officials still controlled much of the production of raw materials in the country, including coffee. In fact, the Indonesian army intended to claim East Timor's coffee-growing hill country as part of Indonesia. The specter of violence being triggered by a change in East Timor's political status did not auger well with the American, Indonesian, and Timorese coffee barons. In fact, as the Indonesians and their supporters departed East Timor, they actually stole some of the 1999 coffee crop from the fields. According to East Timor Action Network (ETAN) sources, the Indonesians brazenly demanded compensation for the coffee fields they plundered in East Timor.
ETAN also reported that in the years prior to the independence plebiscite, officials of the U.S. Institute of Peace, an organization whose board of directors are appointed by the president on the advice of Congress, began providing political seminars to East Timorese in which they stressed that integration into Indonesia with some local autonomy was preferable to outright independence. The Institute of Peace counted among its directors many individuals with extensive ties to the U.S. military and intelligence community.
Many of the East Timorese coffee entrepreneurs made no secret of their preference for Indonesian rule. After all, they were making money, and, even better than that, they were under the umbrella of a U.S. government agency that guaranteed a virtual continuous flow of coffee beans to corporations like Starbuck's. Along with the Indonesian military occupiers, coffee plantation "quislings" provided support to the pro-autonomy militias. Not all the East Timorese coffee workers bought into the autonomy argument. A number were killed by the militias when they made their pro-independence views known.
Reminiscent of Trans Fair USA and its Fair Trade labels, USAID officials, proclaimed their Timor Coffee Project a success (note that they chose not to use the proper name of the countryEast Timorbut the Indonesian name for the entire island ("province"). However, many East Timorese were wary of the real goals of Washington toward the hapless former Portuguese colony. In a 1997 interview with the Los Angeles Times, East Timorese activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos-Horta said, "I am skeptical about U.S. good intentions or professed ideals about promoting democracy because U.S. policy is full of complex contradictions." One of those contradictions was the Clinton administration's tendency to put the interests of economics and political expediency ahead of human rights.
Behind every American foreign policy tilt you can usually find a bevy of political contributors. East Timor is no exception. The chief beneficiary of those delectable East Timor organic coffee beans that flow through the U.S. government-sponsored supply line was Howard Schultz. Not surprisingly, Schultz was a major campaign contributor to Bill Clinton. Ironically, Schultz fancied himself as a progressive Democrat (he joined Bill Bradley's presidential fundraising campaign). But while he has ostensibly championed "health care reform," "liberal employee benefits," and the environment by banning the doubling of coffee cups in his stores, Schultz was much less concerned about the East Timorese, who have weathered one of the world's most brutal military occupations while providing his corporate brew pots with the much-desired East Timor coffee beans. It is noteworthy that Schultz's exploratory presidential campaign has attracted as staffers "never Trumper" Steve Schmidt, the person who convinced John McCain to take on Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, and Bill Burton, a White House adviser to President Barack Obama.
As East Timor descended into chaos in September 1999, Starbucks' public affairs machine assured its customers that its East Timor suppliers were guaranteeing that coffee supplies would not be interrupted, even though the lives of some 800,000 inhabitants of the province were irrevocably thrown into turmoil. But it was clear that Starbuck's would have to re-negotiate the lucrative East Timor coffee deal with the National Council of East Timorese Resistance (CNRT), the organization that formed the post-independence government, since independence threatened to upset the cozy mercantile arrangement worked out between Indonesia, the Timor coffee cooperative, and Starbuck's.
The powerful lobbying interests in Washington had quickly gone to work when East Timor began drifting toward independence. Following East Timor's overwhelming vote for independence, every statement issued by Washington concerning the Indonesian genocide against the people of that province was tainted by assertions that any United Nations relief operation would have to be worked out with the authorities in Jakarta. Oddly, no such preconditions concerning Belgrade's acquiescence were ever attached to NATO's invasion of Kosovo.
Washington's preference for the status quo ante in East Timor was made clear during a speech Clinton delivered on federalism in Mont Tremblant, Quebec, on October 8, 1999. The president opined, "Wouldn't it have been better if they [the East Timorese] could have found their religious, their cultural, their ethnic and their economic footing and genuine self-government in the framework of a larger entity, which would also have supported them economically and reinforced their security instead of undermined it?" Clinton, it will be recalled, owed a debt of gratitude to Indonesia's Riady family for political contributions to his presidential campaign.
Coffee may also determine West Papua's fate. In the highlands of West Papua grows some of the same type of Arabica coffee that Starbuck's shipped from East Timor. According to Washington businessman Jim Hope, who spent a considerable amount of time in West Papua, the West Papuan coffee crop is just waiting for someone to process it. Based on the East Timor example, however, the coffee in all likelihood will be harvested at the expense of the indigenous population.
Starbucks' support for unsavory regimes did not end with the Indonesian military occupiers of East Timor. After Rwandan President Paul Kagame transformed his country into a virtual one-party state, Starbucks announced it was interested in buying Rwandan coffee. In April 2004, Kagame made a pilgrimage to Seattle, the home of Starbucks, with his trade and agriculture ministers in tow. Rwanda's coffee industry received financial support from the Bush administration, anxious to bolster its client in Kigali. The Assistance a la Dynamisation de l'Agribusiness au Rwanda (ADAR), a Rwandan enterprise designed to spur entrepreneurship in the coffee industry, received U.S. government funding.
In an appearance in Seattle to promote his movie "Hotel Rwanda," director Terry George, used the occasion to promote Rwandan coffee: "If Starbuck's would carry Rwandan coffeewhich is extremely good, by the waythat alone could save the country from economic disaster."
Starbuck's is also suspected of buying coffee from foreign companies and plantations that use forced child labor to harvest coffee on plantations in Colombia, Costa Rica, Cote d'Ivoire, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Guinea, Honduras, El Salvador, Kenya, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, and Vietnam. Under Brazil's new neo-Nazi president, Jair Bolsonaro, the nation's child labor laws are being rolled back, with companies like Starbuck's at the ready to take advantage of the situation to purchase cheaper coffee beans. Meanwhile, under Trump's labor secretary, Alex Acosta, the department, which is charged with identifying nations using child labor, has seen its staff thinned out and budget reduced. This is much to the delight of Starbuck's, which is always ready to make a quick buck at the expense of the poorest of the poor and the most vulnerable.
When it comes to billionaires like Schultz, they, like all others, have made their fortunes on the backs of others. In Schultz's case, the backs include those of children as young as five-years old. When it comes to coffee or presidents just take a pass on Starbuck's.
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