The legend

There are many legends that speculate on the origin of the coffee bush, but the most accepted by all researchers is that it comes from the tropical strip of the African continent, in southern Abyssinia, the town of Caffa, today Ethiopia. There are legends that attribute a divine origin to the coffee plant, which tells that the Ethiopian sage Bata Maryan, devoted to prayer and penance, stuck a staff into the ground, which served as a walking stick on his pilgrimages, which later flourished. and she covered herself with red fruits that were the first coffee beans, which when consumed gave her the strength to endure her hardships and overcome sleep in her nocturnal walk. Another legend tells that a shepherd whose name was Kaldi, observing his goats,

History of coffee in Colombia

There are indications from the beginning of the fourteenth century of the passage of coffee to Arabia through Yemen, which is separated from Abyssinia by the narrow strip of the Red Sea, which facilitated trade and transit from one country to another through caravans, for what no one doubts that it was the Arabs, who in the history of the world have always been great merchants, who took the product and dedicated themselves to spreading the influence of its benefits in its consumption, with such enthusiasm and conviction that it became from the start in extraordinary currency generator.

The first coffee crops grew in the eastern part of the country. The first commercial production took place in 1835 and records show that the first 2,560 bags were exported from Cúcuta customs, on the border with Venezuela. According to testimonies of the time, Francisco Romero, a priest who imposed the penance of planting coffee on the parishioners of the town of Salazar de las Palmas during confession, was a great boost in the spread of the cultivation of the grain in this country area. These seeds would have allowed the presence of coffee in the departments of Santander and Norte de Santander, in the northeast of the country, with its consequent spread, starting in 1850, towards the center and the west through Cundinamarca, Antioquia and the area of old Caldas.

Export product

Despite these early developments, the consolidation of coffee as an export product in Colombia only began in the second half of the 19th century. The great expansion of the world economy in that period meant that Colombian landowners found attractive opportunities in the international market. Little by little, the United States became the most important consumer of coffee in the world, while Germany and France became the most interesting markets in Europe.

The large Colombian landowners had already tried to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the expansion of the international economy. Between 1850 and 1857 there was an export boom in the country for tobacco and cinchona, and later for leather and live cattle. Those early efforts to export Colombian agricultural products turned out to be extremely fragile, since they responded to a search for profitability derived from high international prices, rather than the intention of creating a solid and diversified base of sales abroad. When the price bonanza ended, the production of the respective sector entered a phase of decline, which put an end to any attempt at business consolidation.

Coffee also had a speculative expansion of this cut, generated by the situation of good international prices between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 20th century. In this period, the annual production of coffee went from about 60,000 60-kilo bags (the international unit of measurement for the commercialization of coffee is a 60-kilo bag of green coffee) to about 600,000. This expansion occurred mainly in the large haciendas in the departments of Santander and Cundinamarca, whose owners had access to the international banking market to finance their projects. That is why it is not surprising that at the end of the 19th century these two regions accounted for more than 80% of the national production.

The crisis

With the fall in international prices, which occurred in the transition from the 19th century to the 20th century, the profitability of the large farms plummeted. As if that were not enough, the War of the Thousand Days, which took place in the first years of the new century, gave the big landowners another hard blow, since it made it impossible for them to keep the plantations in good condition; This circumstance, added to the fact that these producers had borrowed abroad to develop their crops, ruined them. The coffee plantations of Santander and Norte de Santander entered into crisis, and those of Cundinamarca and Antioquia stagnated.

The crisis of the large farms brought with it one of the most significant changes in Colombian coffee growing. Since 1875 the number of small coffee producers had begun to expand in Santander, in some areas of Antioquia and in the area called Viejo Caldas. In the first decades of the 20th century, an innovative coffee export development model based on the peasant economy had already been consolidated, driven by internal migration and the colonization of new lands in the center and west of the country, mainly in the departments of Antioquia, Caldas, Valle and the North of Tolima. The expansion of this new coffee culture, added to the crisis of the large farms, made western Colombia take the lead in the country’s coffee development at the beginning of the 20th century.

This transformation was very favorable for the owners of small plots that were entering the sector. The cultivation of coffee was a very attractive option for peasants, to the extent that it offered the possibility of making permanent and intensive use of the land. Under the productive scheme of traditional agriculture, based on the slash and burn procedure, the land remained unproductive for a long period of time. On the other hand, coffee offered the possibility of having an intensive agriculture, without major technical requirements and without sacrificing the cultivation of subsistence products, generating the conditions for the growth of a new coffee farming, dominated by small owners.

National Federation of Colombian Coffee Growers

Although the new peasant coffee growers proved to have a great capacity to grow regardless of international price conjunctures, Colombia did not have great relative dynamism in the world market in this period. As can be seen in the following graph, in the period between 1905 and 1935 the coffee industry in Colombia grew dynamically, thanks to the long-term policy vision derived from the creation of the National Federation of Coffee Growers (FNC  )  in 1927.

In 1930 Colombia consolidated itself as the second largest coffee producer in the world.

The union of peasants and small producers around the Federation has allowed them to face common logistics and marketing challenges that individually they would not have been able to overcome. Over time, and through research at Cenicafé, founded in 1938, and the Agricultural Extension Service, cultivation and traceability systems were developed that made it possible to differentiate the product and guarantee its quality. Currently, the land of coffee in Colombia includes all the mountain ranges and mountainous areas of the country, generating income for more than 563,000 families that produce the grain.