Tín hiệu dẫn bài trong Part 4

Good morning. Today I want to look at how coffee became a global commodity, and I'll be focusing on three periods in particular. To begin with, let's consider the plant's origins. Coffee grows wild in the highlands of Ethiopia, and there is written evidence of it being brewed there by the fifteenth century. What's important here is that coffee spread as a drink long before it spread as a crop, moving north through the Arabian peninsula while cultivation stayed in a single region. Turning now to the colonial period, we see something quite different. European powers began planting coffee in their tropical colonies, and by 1800 production had shifted almost entirely away from Africa. Whereas Ethiopian coffee had been grown by smallholders, colonial coffee was grown on plantations, and that difference in scale set prices for the next two centuries. Let me give you an example. Brazil, which planted its first commercial estates in the 1720s, was producing half the world's supply by 1850. Finally, and this is the point I'd like you to take away, the modern market inverted the pattern once again. Speciality buyers now pay a premium for beans traced to a single farm, which means smallholders in the region where coffee originated are, after three centuries, competitive again.