Useless Coffee History fact of the day!.....When the Ottomans occupied Yemen in 1536, they tried to maintain a monopoly on production of the beverage, banning the export of coffee beans that hadn’t first been sterilized. Seeds were smuggled out by intrepid traders; first by Muslim pilgrims headed to southern India and later to Java, Indonesia, by the Dutch, who cultivated it for export. Because coffee is native to equatorial Africa, it only grows easily in the tropics, so European colonial interests pushed for increased coffee production in Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia and Oceania. In Brazil, slave labor was the backbone of the coffee industry until the late 1800s. In Central America and Southeast Asia, colonial governments often imposed quotas that forced native populations to produce solely coffee, leaving them vulnerable to poverty and famine!
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 13:21:27 +0000