CHAPTER IV 



COFFEE, CACAO OR CHOCOLATE, KOLA, ETC. 



Coffee. This plant is now mainly cultivated in Brazil and 

 the rest of tropical America, which give more than half the 

 supply, Java, and South India, but thirty or forty years ago was 

 the mainstay of export agriculture in Ceylon, in which island 

 there were about 300,000 acres devoted to it. Its history in 

 Ceylon is of some interest. Next to the old sugar cultivation 

 of the West Indies, coffee cultivation was the first industry in 

 the tropics that was found worth attention by Europeans (other 

 than Governments) the first, if slave labour be left out of 

 account. It was first taken up in Ceylon in the early thirties. 

 From then till about 1845 there was a tremendous " boom " in 

 it, and it was engaged in by numerous persons who had no 

 knowledge whatever of tropical cultivation, with the inevitable 

 collapse, as described in more detail in another place. Then 

 came a period of resuscitation and renewed prosperity under 

 more skilled superintendence, lasting till about 1870, when the 

 first signs of the insidious leaf-disease, Hemileia vastatrix, 

 a parasitic fungus feeding upon the leaves of the coffee bush, 

 began to appear. Numerous remedies were suggested and 

 tried, but all without avail, and the disease spread and spread 

 over the great sheet of coffee cultivation in the mountains, and 

 was closely followed by a bad attack of " green bug," until in 

 the eighties the cultivation was practically entirely ruined, and 

 the numerous European planters reduced almost to beggary. 

 It is doubtful if the world can produce a more striking instance 

 of the complete destruction of an industry by the attacks of 

 disease, though it is certain that if tea had not then come in, 

 and proved very profitable, coffee would not have died out so 

 completely as has been the case. 



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