Storms in coffee and tea cups

WASHINGTON, March 17 (UPI) -- Coffee and tea are stirring up storms in their cups again. Coffee consumption, sharply reduced in the household of British Prime Minister Tony Blair by his wife Cherie following his racing heart health scare last year, is now said to be good for that capricious but resolute organ.

Dietician Chiara Trombetti of the Humanitas Gavazzeni institute in the northern Italian town of Bergamo says that far from giving you palpitations, coffee helps improve the circulation within the heart. It's the tannin and antioxidants that do it. And if that's not recommendation enough, she says it can also help prevent cirrhosis of the liver, stave off gallstones and relieve headaches. What's more, asthma attacks could be reduced by coffee's caffeine content.

Women in 15th century Egypt and Turkey would not be surprised at any of this. They had the right to a divorce if their husband denied them their daily quota of coffee. It was the nomadic Galla tribe of Ethiopia that realized sometime before 1000 A.D. that their daily helping of a particular local berry, which they ground up and molded with animal fat into a ball, was giving them an energy charge. That bean, of course, was coffee. Arab traders brought it home and turned it into a boiled drink they called "qahwa" -- "sleep preventer." By the 15th century, it was drunk daily across the Middle East.

Chiara Trombetti's declaration should cheer the coffee farmers of East Africa. At a conference in mid-February attended by singer Harry Belafonte and film star Danny Glover, they lamented the slump in coffee prices in the global market and its devastating effect on the region. Nestor Osorio, executive director of the International Coffee Organization, urged East Africans to drink more coffee to support the coffee farmers and local economies. Kenyan Vice President Moody Awori pointed out that Ethiopians consume half of their country's coffee production, while Kenya and the rest of the 10 nations in the Easter Africa Fine Coffee Association drink only 1 percent of their coffee output.

The British charity Oxfam released a report in September 2002 demonstrating that with the global oversupply of coffee, prices had fallen to their lowest in 100 years, impoverishing millions of coffee farmers in developing countries. They are paid roughly 24 cents a pound for beans which the four multinational companies that buy nearly half of the world's coffee -- Sara Lee, Kraft, Procter & Gamble and Nestlé -- sell at an average of $3.60 a pound.

These figures fuelled the Fair Trade-certified coffee movement, which guarantees a so-called living wage to coffee farmers, paying them $1.25 a pound for their beans. Fair Trade coffee retails at a higher price than conventionally traded coffee. But the movement has managed to persuade Sara Lee to purchase a small amount of it. Although Fair Trade coffee represents about 2 percent of the world's $55 billion coffee industry, its sales in 2001 rose 36 percent in the United States over the previous year.

More than three out of four adult Americans drink coffee daily or regularly according to the National Coffee Association, and they prefer to buy it not at those snappy Seattle coffee chains, but from convenience stores, which sold more than $4.3 billion in coffee alone in 2002 -- roughly $33,500 per store just for the hot beverage.

Meanwhile, tea drinking -- or the lack of it -- is at the center of a case at the European Court of Justice. British workers are complaining that their government has not legislated to establish enough opportunities to drink a cuppa -- or two or four -- during the working day. Amicus, the United Kingdom's largest manufacturing, technical and skilled persons' union, complained four years ago that Working Time Directive rules allowing for breaks during the day weren't being implemented.

"Because of the climate of fear and downsizing in many workplaces," Roger Lyons, president of the Trades Union Congress and joint general secretary of Amicus told reporters, "workers fail to take their legal entitlements to a tea break."

Tea arrived in England courtesy of Charles II's wife, Catherine of Braganza, a century after the Portuguese brought it back from Macao. It was taken up at once by the court, with tea salons and tea gardens quite the sudden fashion. Mid-afternoon became the time to pay social visits and drop the newly invented calling card if the lady of the house was herself out paying a social call. The English added lemon or milk and sugar to the clear Chinese drink and concocted the little sandwiches, cakes and pastries that turned the whole ceremony into an occasion for gossiping, much like the Chinese with their dim sum. The tea trolley that was a fixture of many offices until automated drink machines took their place always carried a supply of buns and pastries along with the urn filled with the brick-orange Indian tea that workers regarded more highly than the scented Chinese counterpart.

If British workers were prepared to lose their snacks, they are not going to give up their cuppa without a fight.