Coffee production in Brazil
Coffee plantations, covering some 27,000 km2 (10,000 sq mi), are mainly located in the southeastern states of Minas Gerais, São Paulo and Paraná where the environment and climate provide ideal growing conditions.
[6] Coffee plantations in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Minas Gerais quickly grew in size in the 1820s,[4] accounting for 20% of the world's production.
In the 1840s, both the share of total exports and of world production reached 40%, making Brazil the largest coffee producer.
[9] When the foreign slave trade was outlawed in 1850, plantation owners began turning more and more to European immigrants to meet labor demands.
The name refers to the largest states' dominant industries: coffee in São Paulo and dairy in Minas Gerais.
With one million inhabitants in the 1930s, São Paulo surpassed Rio de Janeiro as the country's largest city and most important industrial center.
[17] By the early 20th century, coffee accounted for 16% of Brazil's gross national product, and three-fourths of its export earnings.
[18] The February 1906 Taubaté Agreement is a clear example of the large political influence São Paulo wielded owing to its role in the coffee trade.
[21] The valorization scheme was successful from the perspective of the planters and the Brazilian state,[22] but led to a global oversupply and increased the damages from the crash during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
North of São Paulo was the Paraíba Valley, this region was home to Oeste Paulista, a once hegemon of Brazilian coffee.
This led the way for second slavery to exist, promoted by the Brazilian government and international European pressures to further expand the coffee economy.
Historian Dale Tomich describes "The concept of the second slavery radically reinterprets the relation of slavery and capitalism by calling attention to the emergence of extensive new zones of slave commodity production in the US South, Cuba, and Brazil as part of nineteenth-century industrialization and world-economic expansion."
Using this perspective on second slavery, it explains the coffee industry in Brazil today when tracing its origins in the 19th century.
Mathisen goes on to say: "Not only did Cuban sugar, Brazilian coffee, and American cotton become cash crops in high demand, but their production drew inspiration from new, brutal labor techniques, buoyed by new ideas about the scientific management of agriculture and labor…"[31] Much of the Brazilian coffee landscape has to do with its labor and social history.
As Dale Tomisch, in much of his works point out, sugar, cotton, and coffee, have forever changed the landscape on which people build their lives, as its history has seen the evolution of these sugar-based societies.
Having the context of second slavery in mind, when looking at these three major commodities; coffee, unlike sugar and cotton, became more prominent in the 19th century in Brazil.
After independence coffee plantations were associated with slavery, underdevelopment, and a political oligarchy, and not the modern development of state and society.
[37][38] US officials criticized Brazil for not being willing to accept a reduction of the country's quotas despite falling share of the world market since 1980.
[36] Jorio Dauster, head of the state-controlled Brazilian Coffee Institute, believed Brazil could survive without help from the agreement.
[47] Plantations are mainly located in the southeastern states of Minas Gerais, São Paulo and Paraná where the environment and climate provide ideal growing conditions.
[49] Most plantations are harvested in the dry seasons of June through September,[50] usually in one huge annual crop when most berries are ripe.
[52] The outer layer of the dried berry is then removed in a hulling process before the beans are sorted, graded and packed in 60 kg bags.
[56][note 1] The devastating black frost of 1975 struck on 18 July,[57] hitting hardest in Paraná,[58] Minas Gerais and São Paulo.
[69][70] Per capita, Brazil is the 14th largest consumer and, along with Ethiopia, the only major coffee producer with a sizeable domestic consumption.
