CHAPTER II. 



PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION. 



THE Eastern hemisphere appears quite to have taken 

 the place of the Western in the production and supply 

 of coffee. Partly owing to the high price of labour 

 and land, and partly to other causes, such as exhaus- 

 tion of soil, etc., the British possessions in the West 

 Indies only produce between three and four millions 

 of pounds of coffee annually, against fully ten times 

 that quantity twenty years ago. The French and 

 Spanish colonies are also giving up the cultivation in 

 favour of other articles, and the fall in the price of the 

 article, together with the rise in the price of labour, 

 provisions, and land, all over the world, has reduced 

 the area where coffee can be profitably cultivated, to a 

 very small extent. Brazil, Java, a portion of the 

 Central American Republics, and our own colonies of 

 Ceylon and British India, are the only countries where 

 coffee can be cultivated with certainty as a profitable 

 speculation. It has been already shown that the pro- 

 duce of the first of these has fallen off considerably of 

 late years. In Java it is stationary and the produce 

 is inferior, whilst in Ceylon it can be produced and 

 shipped for 35s. per cwt., and in British India at one- 

 sixth less, owing to the lower rate of wages and 

 cheaper transport to the coast. 



