Coffee Industry's understanding of Coffee and the Black History of Coffee Industry

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Coffee and colonialism

Coffee originated in tropical Africa, but now Brazil is the largest coffee producer in the world. Vietnam and Colombia are the second and third largest producers. Before coffee was brought to America by European colonists, it was traded in the Middle East, Asia and Europe, and the success of this crop had something to do with slavery. Therefore, there is no way to look at the history of coffee without recognizing the role of racism and colonization.

Mark Pendergrast, author of long live Coffee: how small Coffee changes the World, said that at the end of the 18th century, European colonists began to recognize the profitability behind coffee, and European and colonial demand for coffee was very high. In order to build profitable estates, European companies imported large numbers of slaves from Africa to work on farms in the Caribbean, Asia and America. The so-called triangular trade.

Babedo and Jamaica were the earliest British colonies, and slave traders provided labor from Africa to outposts to process sugar and grow coffee. The colonies of West Africa, the Caribbean and America, and Europe formed a triangle to circulate goods and labor.

Santo Domingo, the capital of the French colony of Haiti, supplied half the world's coffee in 1788 as a direct result of slave labor. He described the shocking living conditions at that time, in which slaves were often underfed, overworked and arranged to live in windowless huts, and he detailed that it was not uncommon for African slaves to be beaten, tortured and killed by white European rulers.

Napoleon's failure to recapture Haiti in the early 19th century led to a decline in coffee production, prompting the Dutch to fill the gap with coffee they produced in the Indonesian colony of Java.

There is a strict grading system between the local Javanese and their colonial rulers.

The slave trade in America

With the decline in coffee production in the West Indies, it is also booming in South America. It is reported that Brazil's first coffee tree was planted in Pala by Francisco de Melo Palheta in 1727. Brazil will continue to be a coffee superpower under the rule of Portugal and continue to develop after independence. By the 1830s, coffee had become Brazil's largest export, accounting for about 30% of the world's coffee production. But it requires huge labor costs.

When they die of overwork, they import new slaves directly, rather than treat their existing slaves with any compassion. He said that most slaves could not survive seven years of labor.

Slavery was not considered illegal in Brazil until 1888, but before that, more than 4 million slaves had been brought to Brazil from Africa.