The governor's coffee
Fifth in a series on Portuguese companies and investors in Asia — what they built, what survived, and what is still being built today.
A Sociedade Agrícola Pátria e Trabalho produz nas suas plantações de Fátu-Béssi, na área do posto da Ermera, o excelente e aromático café de Timor e algum cacau. Em 1940, as acções desta sociedade pertenciam aos herdeiros do grande governador de Timor, coronel Celestino da Silva […], ao Estado português, ao Banco Nacional Ultramarino e a uma firma japonesa, pelo que uma meia dúzia de empregados da sociedade eram súbditos nipónicos, sendo os mais importantes os srs. Segawa e Inocúchi. — José dos Santos Carvalho, Vida e Morte em Timor durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial (Lisboa: Livraria Portugal, 1972)
The Sociedade Agrícola Pátria e Trabalho produces, on its plantations at Fatubessi in the district of Ermera, the excellent and aromatic coffee of Timor, and some cocoa. In 1940 the shares of this company belonged to the heirs of the great governor of Timor, Colonel Celestino da Silva […], to the Portuguese state, to the Banco Nacional Ultramarino, and to a Japanese firm — so that half a dozen of the company's employees were Japanese subjects, the most important of them Messrs Segawa and Inocuchi. — José dos Santos Carvalho, Vida e Morte em Timor durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial (Lisbon: Livraria Portugal, 1972)
You can buy Timorese coffee in most cities now. The bag on my kitchen counter names the district it came from — Ermera — and, if the roaster is the kind that cares about such things, it will name the variety too: Híbrido de Timor.
That variety is why this instalment exists. Not because it is a curiosity, but because almost every rust-resistant arabica plant grown anywhere in the world today has it somewhere in its family tree. Timor is not a minor coffee origin that happens to have a nice story. Timor is, genetically, one of the load-bearing walls of the global coffee industry.
And the plantation where the plant was found was owned by a company founded by the sitting colonial governor, on land taken from the people who lived on it.
Both of those things are true, and this post is about not choosing between them.
A company founded by the man who licensed it
José Celestino da Silva was governor of Portuguese Timor from 1894 to 1908. In 1897, while in office, he founded the Sociedade Agrícola Pátria e Trabalho — the Agricultural Society "Homeland and Work."
During his tenure he was the owner of, or involved in, almost all of the colony's private plantation companies. Historians describe SAPT as functioning practically as a state within a state. With its subsidiaries, the Empresa Agrícola Perseverança and the Empresa Agrícola Limitada Timor, it was the only agricultural enterprise in Portuguese Timor of any importance.
The method is recorded plainly in the scholarship, and there is no gentle way to summarize it: SAPT frequently appropriated land and then hired the dispossessed former owners as labourers, on subsistence wages.
This is a different thing from the Goan mining houses in the last instalment. Those were family firms that acquired concessions under a legal regime and sold ore into a world market. Here the man writing the rules, granting the land and commanding the troops was also the principal shareholder. There was no daylight between the state and the company because they were the same person.
By the late 1920s SAPT was producing around 200 tonnes of coffee a year and buying in another hundred for export.
The shareholder list of 1940
Which brings us to the passage at the top of this post, and to what I think is the single most extraordinary sentence I have found in researching this series.
A Portuguese public health doctor, newly posted to Timor, writing up what the colony's economy consisted of, lists the owners of its largest company in 1940: the heirs of the founding governor, the Portuguese state, the Banco Nacional Ultramarino — and a Japanese firm.
Readers of the first instalment will recognize the third name. BNU is turning into a recurring character in this series, and it is worth saying why. A bank chartered to finance an empire ends up holding equity in that empire's plantations, because in a small colonial economy there is nobody else to hold it. This is what it looks like when a state has no capital market: the state bank becomes the capital market.
The fourth name is the arresting one.
The Japanese shareholder was Nan'yō Kōhatsu (南洋興発), the South Seas Development Company. It was not an ordinary trading firm. It was a national-policy company, created to develop and settle the Pacific islands Japan held under mandate, and it worked hand in glove with the Imperial Navy. By 1940 it held something in the region of 40% of SAPT. Portugal had come close to bankruptcy in the Depression, and the shares were available.
Carvalho's memoir tells you what that looked like from Ermera: half a dozen Japanese employees on the plantations, the most senior of them a Mr Segawa and a Mr Inocuchi.
What Carvalho could not have known is that the arrangement had been designed in Tokyo four years earlier. A Japanese naval policy memorandum of July 1936, on the question of advancing into Portuguese Timor, set out the method:
進出ハ不言実行ヲ旨トシ買収等ニ関スル我方ノ意向ハ此ノ際絶対ニ秘匿シ The advance is to be made by deeds and not by words; our intentions regarding acquisitions and the like are for the present to be absolutely concealed.
The same document directed that the move be made through Nan'yō Kōhatsu, that the company be supported quietly from behind, and that the colony's officials and population be guided towards what it called a gradually pro-Japanese disposition. A naval committee had selected Timor for study the year before, for reasons partly economic — there was thought to be oil — and substantially strategic. The island lay between the Dutch East Indies and Australia, and of all the colonial powers in the region, Portugal was the weakest and the only neutral one.
The joint venture with SAPT was agreed in 1937 and formally established in 1939, after delays over the transfer of land and objections from other governments. Australia's foreign minister said publicly that his country could not remain calm about the establishment of a large Japanese enterprise at Dili. In October 1941, Japan opened a consulate-general in the town and signed an agreement opening an air route between Dili and Palau.
Two months later the war reached the island. In December 1941 Australian and Dutch troops landed in Dili; in February 1942 the Japanese came, and stayed until 1945. Somewhere between forty and seventy thousand Timorese died during the occupation.
A coffee plantation did not cause an invasion. But neither were these shares an investment that happened to precede one. Buying into the colony's largest company was the instrument of a policy, written down in advance, with concealment as an explicit instruction. The men tending SAPT's coffee at Fatubessi in 1940 were the visible end of it.
The other name in that paragraph
Carvalho's account continues past the part usually quoted. At Hatolia, he writes, tea was grown, particularly on a state farm called the Granja Eduardo Marques, in the district of Ermera — cujo capataz era o deportado, sr. Carrascalão, "whose foreman was the deportee, Mr Carrascalão."
Salazar's Estado Novo sent political prisoners to Timor. One of them, almost certainly, is the man in that sentence: Manuel Viegas Carrascalão, whose sons João and Mário would become, respectively, a leader of the UDT party and the Indonesian-appointed governor of occupied East Timor. I flag this as a probable identification rather than a confirmed one, and I would be glad to be corrected.
It is a small line in a doctor's memoir. But it tells you how the colony worked: a political exile supervising a state tea farm, next door to a company owned by a dead governor's family, the Portuguese treasury, a colonial bank and a Japanese conglomerate.
What happened to the company
After the war the Japanese shares were seized. The register was redrawn: 40% to the Portuguese state, 52% to the Silva family, 8% to the BNU.
SAPT emerged from the war as the only large plantation and trading company in the colony. It controlled trade with both Portugal and Japan, commanded around 20% of all of Portuguese Timor's trade, and held a monopoly on the purchase of arabica — the best and most important coffee grown on the island. It also produced cocoa and rubber.
In 1948 and 1949 it put up a new administrative building in Dili, opposite the Liceu Dr. Francisco Machado on what is now the Rua de Moçambique, in Colmera — one of the first new buildings in the city after the war. At the time the corner was Rua Sebastião and Rua Dom Fernando. The BNU's own premises had been destroyed during the Japanese occupation, and in the post-war years the bank operated out of SAPT's, not moving into its own modernist building until 1968. The building is still there, now housing various businesses, and above the old main entrance the letters SAPT remain legible beneath a newer coat of paint.
Then, after the Indonesian invasion of 1975, Indonesian officers took control of SAPT's holdings for their personal benefit.
Read that sentence alongside the Goan one from the previous blog post in this series. The sovereign changes; the extraction continues; the asset passes to whoever is now in a position to hold it. A right granted by a Portuguese governor to himself in 1897 was still generating income for somebody in 1985 — just not for anyone Portuguese, and never for the people who had been farming the land in the first place.
After independence in 2002, Timor-Leste inherited the problem of what to do with the tracts of land SAPT had held. Three laws passed by the National Parliament in February 2012 attempted to settle it, and were criticized within the country as being designed more to enable corporate investment than to protect individual claimants. That argument is not over.
Fatubessi
Now go back to the epigraph and look at the place name: Fátu-Béssi, today Fatubessi, in Ermera. That is where SAPT's plantations were.
In 1927, in a plantation of typica arabica established there in 1917, someone noticed a coffee plant that should not have existed. Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora — robusta — do not readily cross. Arabica is tetraploid and self-pollinating; robusta is diploid. But if you put enough of both together for long enough, something eventually happens, and at Fatubessi it did.
The resulting plant carried robusta's resistance to Hemileia vastatrix, the leaf rust that had been destroying arabica plantations worldwide since the 1870s, while cupping close to arabica. Timorese farmers began planting it in the 1940s. In 1953 seed went out from Fatubessi into the world.
From the 1950s and 1960s, the Coffee Rust Research Centre in Portugal and its partners used the Timor Hybrid to breed rust resistance into commercial arabica. Crossed with Caturra it produced Catimor; crossed with Villa Sarchi, Sarchimor. Those two families are the backbone of rust-resistant arabica from Latin America to Asia, and at least five resistance genes in modern arabica breeding lines trace back to that robusta parent at Fatubessi.
Almost none of the value created by that plant has returned to the village it came from.
And there is a statue in Fatubessi today of José Celestino da Silva, the governor who founded the company and started the plantations.
What the farmers have now
The coffee industry that exists in Timor-Leste today is not SAPT's, and was not built on its model.
In 1994, an American cooperative development organization, funded by USAID, helped organize 450 coffee farmers into the Cooperativa Café Timor. It now has in the region of twenty to twenty-seven thousand smallholder members, most farming less than a hectare each, across Ermera, Ainaro and Liquiçá. It obtained Fair Trade certification in 2001. It runs rural health clinics and mobile clinic teams that have treated patients in the millions. Coffee is the country's leading agricultural export, worth something around twelve million US dollars a year, and Timorese coffee has been sold under Starbucks' Reserve label.
Twelve million dollars is not very much. Timor-Leste's state budget runs on petroleum revenue, and the coffee sector's importance is social rather than fiscal: it is what a large number of rural households actually live on.
But the structure is the opposite of the one this post began with. The land is held by the people farming it, the processing and the export contracts are owned collectively, and the revenue funds clinics rather than a governor's estate. Whether that holds as the sector grows is a genuine open question, and the 2012 land laws suggest it is contested.
What I could not find
I have worked here from Portuguese, English and Japanese sources, and I am conscious of which language is missing.
Carvalho's memoir is a Portuguese colonial doctor's account, sympathetic to the Estado Novo and frank about very little. The Japanese material is naval and corporate, and tells you what Tokyo intended rather than what happened in a village. The scholarship is European, Japanese and Australian. What I have not been able to work with is Tetum-language material, oral history from Ermera, or Timorese scholarship on what SAPT's land appropriations meant in particular places — and it is those accounts, not a shareholder list or a policy memorandum, that would tell you what this company actually did to the people who worked for it.
There is also an unresolved dispute on the public record that readers should know about. The English-language Wikipedia entry on SAPT contains, inside the article text, a rebuttal by someone evidently connected to Dr Sales Luís — the man who sold the shares to Nan'yō Kōhatsu and was reportedly banned from returning to Timor as a "bad patriot" — asserting that he was never banned, remained in Timor, continued to manage the company, and left only in 1986 when he became ill. I have no way to assess this. I note it because it is a reminder that this is not settled history. There are families on several sides of it who are still arguing.
If you have documents, photographs, or family memory of SAPT — in Timor-Leste, Portugal, Australia or Japan — I would very much like to hear from you.
O que sobrou — what is still there
The letters SAPT, still legible under a newer coat of paint above the old main entrance of the company's 1949 building, opposite the Liceu Dr. Francisco Machado in Colmera, Dili.
The statue of Governor Celestino da Silva at Fatubessi, in the village whose land his company took, and whose coffee plant changed the world.
The Híbrido de Timor itself, listed by the Slow Food Foundation on its Ark of Taste, and present in the ancestry of rust-resistant arabica on four continents. If you have drunk a Catimor or a Sarchimor — and if you drink commodity arabica, you almost certainly have — you have tasted the descendants of one accidental plant in Ermera.
The word kafé in Tetum, and Ermera's continuing status as the country's coffee heartland, a century and a quarter after a governor decided that was what the district was for.
Next
SAPT was a colonial company in the oldest sense: it took land, it grew a crop, and it shipped it out. The model is easy to describe and hard to defend.
But by the time SAPT was winding down, Portugal had worked out something considerably more lucrative, in a territory with no land worth farming and no minerals at all. It did not need to own anything, or grow anything, or dig anything. It only needed to decide who was allowed to do business — and to charge for the privilege.
Next in the series: Macau, and the concession as a product in its own right.
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