History of yerba mate
It is marked by a rapid expansion in harvest and consumption in the Spanish South American colonies but also by its difficult domestication process that began in the mid 17th century and again later when production was industrialized around 1900.
This widespread consumption turned it into Paraguay's main commodity above other wares like tobacco, and Indian labour was used to harvest wild stands.
In the mid 17th century Jesuits managed to domesticate the plant and establish plantations in their Indian reductions in Misiones, sparking severe competition with the Paraguayan harvesters of wild stands.
When Brazilian entrepreneurs turned their attention to coffee in the 1930s Argentina, which had long been the prime consumer, took over as the largest producer, resurrecting Misiones Province where the Jesuits had once had most of their plantations.
[1] Before the arrival of the Spanish, the Guaraní people, indigenous to the area of natural distribution of the plant, are known to have consumed yerba mate at least for medicinal purposes.
[5] In early 17th century, yerba mate had become the chief export of the Guaraní territories, above sugar, wine and tobacco, which had previously dominated.
The settlers of Maracaýu relocated to the south forming the modern city of Villarrica and transformed their new lands into the new centre of the mate industry.
[10] Once trade networks were established mate arrived overland to Chile and from Valparaíso small quantities were exported north to the ports of El Callao, Guayaquil and Panama.
In 1680 the Spanish Crown imposed a special tax on yerba mate aimed to finance Buenos Aires defence works and garrison.
[9] The shift southward to Villarrica of the production led Asunción to lose position as the sole hub of export downstream to Santa Fe and Buenos Aires.
[11] The Jesuits began in the late 16th century to establish a series of reduction settlements in the lands of the Guaraní people to convert them to Catholicism.
[12] The Jesuits initially followed the normal production procedure by sending thousands of Guaranís out into long journeys to the swamps where the best trees grew to harvest naturally occurring stands, where many Indians fell ill or died.
Concepción in Paraguay, founded in 1773, became a major port of export since it had a huge hinterland of untouched stands of yerba mate north of it.
[4] In the 19th-century yerba mate attracted the attention of the French naturalists Aimé Bonpland and Augustin Saint-Hilaire who, separately, studied the plant.
At independence, Argentina inherited both the largest mate-consuming population in the world as well as Misiones Province where most of the Jesuit missions had been and where the industry was in decay.
[3] In Paraguay, yerba mate continued to be a major cash crop after independence but the foci of industry shifted away from the mixed plantations and wild stands of Villarrica, north to Concepción in late colonial times and then by 1863 to San Pedro.
German botanist Eduard Friedrich Poeppig described in 1827 a wealthy family in Chile where the old people drank yerba mate with bombilla while the younger preferred Chinese tea.
The trend of decreasing mate consumption was noticed in 1875 by the British consul Rumbold who said that "imports of Paraguayan tea" were "steadily falling off".
