Rich landowner talking to a labourer (ancient paint)
During the second half of the eighteenth century extended plantations prospered in most of the tropical countries, with a remarkable supremacy of France, that better exploited the plants of its colonies. But during the Napoleonic embargo at the beginning of 1800, the French diffusion of the plantations dropped.
The English were the ones who satisfied the European market for many years, until when the interest in the drink decreased. From Arabia and from its bordering African countries, thanks to the Dutch, French, English first, and to the Spanish and Portuguese later, soon the cultivations invaded the whole African tropical area, the archipelago regions to extend to the continental countries of South America. From Guayana, the plants sailed the sea to Brazil in 1727, to later diffuse to the other countries of Centre - South America that were located between the two tropics.
In 1727, under the guidance of the botanist Fra Jose Mariano De Conceicao Veloso, coffee started being cultivated in Para, to be then cultivated in the whole Brazil, surpassing and often replacing the cultivations of sugar canes and achieving, in a few decade, very high percentages of production, reaching in 1928 the 4/5 of the whole worldwide production.
From the beginning of the thirties, for approximately fifteen years, 77 millions of 60 Kg bags were destroyed because of the high costs of storage. During those years the African countries producing coffee had the possibility to introduce their product into the market at competitive prices because their not-exceeding production quantity did not need any storage. Today everything is scheduled: production and costs have normalized compared to the cost of life, and coffee continues being the pre-eminently energetic drink, achieving during three centuries the highest consumption peak.
Brazil and Colombia keep being the main coffee producers and exporters. Coffee is the most important product for the economy of these two countries, absorbing the main occupational force and giving the highest profits to their national balances.