Coffee on Martinique • History of the 1. Plant in South America • Bunaa

In 1723 the French naval officer de Clieu commissioned by King Louis XV. imported three blue mountain coffee trees from the Jardin des Plantes in Paris to Martinique.
In 1726 coffee was harvested for the first time on the fertile island.
Btw., Martinique is located only 1.900 km southwest of Jamaica. There coffee plants arrived 5 years later and wrote history!
De Clieus ship, the Dromedaire, was threatened by pirates. After escaping with the crew, however, the ship was flushed to a cliff. After all went off board, the officer shared his water supply with the plants and could at least save one Arabica plant. It is considered as the ancestor of all Central and South American coffee plants.
In 1778 there were already 16.6 million coffee trees on Martinique.
In the end, 90% of the total coffee worldwide comes from this one plant.
Built on slavery, as in many other countries, the plantation industry was introduced and sugar cane, coffee and cocoa were cultivated.
In 1764 an order from Berlin of 2,000 pounds to 16 Sous is known.
The islands of the Antilles covered then 75% of the European coffee consumption.

In more recent history the pioneer was suspended.
Many coffee plantations gave way to banana plantations.
Today, however, one can still visit hundreds of large farms, mostly of a small rum distillery or a typical Creole building
Today’s coffee is cultivated in the north of the country.
Martinique was the leading coffee producer regarding harvest per hectare in 1970 with 21,429 hectogram per hectare.
Now it ranks only 13th with 9,865 hectograms.
However, in total, Martinique produced only 25 tonnes of coffee in 2013 and is therefore not relevant to the global economy.