Coffee stories Brazilian Coffee used to be the Kingdom of Coffee

Brazil-once the Kingdom of Coffee

In the 1660s, the South American continent was still in a natural silence, and the aborigines lived a happy and heavenly life in this rich and fertile land. Brazil, which covers an area of more than 3 million square kilometers, occupies a major part of South America.

In 1727, Pachta, a Portuguese officer, tempted the wife of the French Guiana Governor to introduce coffee to Brazil with coffee seeds, but he did not try it in the Para region of northern Brazil. It was not until 1774 that Belgian missionaries tried to grow it in the temperate mountains of Rio in southern Brazil. After the 19th century, due to the low price of sugar in the international market and the depletion of mineral deposits in the south, coffee became the most important product in Brazil and became the largest coffee producer in the world in less than 100 years.

At the beginning of the 20th century, coffee, as the main product of Brazil, was the economic lifeline of the country. Stimulated by the continued rise in the international coffee market, Brazilians grow a lot of coffee and even rely on imports of grain such as wheat. Large areas of cultivation have disrupted the ecological balance, and periodic frosts, droughts and rust are threatening Brazilian production. (the worst of these was the frost that first fell on Parana, Brazil in 1975, killing about 1.5 billion coffee trees and severely damaging Brazilian coffee production. In addition, the two frosts in 1994 also caused heavy losses to Brazilian coffee.)

But the disaster is nothing compared to the overproduction of coffee. In the early years of the 20th century, coffee was harvested in many countries, including Brazil and Central and South America, and the annual output of beans exceeded 20 million bags. At that time, the annual global consumption of coffee was only 15 million bags. For a moment, coffee beans became the biggest disaster for Brazilians. But it is clear that coffee overproduction is not all or even the main cause of the coffee disaster, coffee merchants in the international futures market is the main culprit, so that Brazil after several acts of "price stabilization policy" failed, in the early 1930s, burned 7 million bags of coffee. By 1937, 17 million bags of coffee beans had been burned in Brazil, compared with global coffee consumption of 25 million bags in the same year.

Today, Brazil still ranks first in coffee production in the world, but the proportion of coffee in the country's gross domestic product has dropped to about 10%. Coffee is no longer a single-handedness, affecting the economic lifeline of Brazilians. After all, it seems unwise to bet all your money on one thing, whether for a country or a person, even if it is coffee, it is too risky.