400,000 plant species and we built entire civilizations around two shrubs. Not wheat, not rice, not anything that keeps you alive. Two plants whose main offering is a chemical that delays the feeling of tiredness for a few hours. Cultures that never had contact with each other, separated by oceans and centuries, independently figured out that these particular plants were worth domesticating, trading, and eventually growing on a continental scale.
The maps published by VividMaps using SPAM 2020 V2r0 data illustrate the regions where these two species are cultivated.
Coffea began in the forests of Ethiopia and eventually reached every continent with a suitable climate, which turns out to be a fairly specific set of places. Camellia sinensis moved outward from Chinese hillsides, first along trade routes and later through deliberate colonial transplantation into India, Sri Lanka, and East Africa. Both plants traveled well because dried leaves and roasted seeds don't spoil easily.
Coffee is the more complicated case geographically because it's really two separate crops pretending to share a category. Arabica and Robusta look similar enough in a bag, but their growing requirements have almost nothing in common. Arabica is specific to the point of being difficult. It needs to be high up, above 1,000 meters and more comfortably at 1,500 to 2,000, where nights are genuinely cold and the wet and dry seasons trade off in a pattern the plant can use. At those elevations, the fungal diseases and insect populations that routinely destroy Arabica at lower altitudes don't get established as easily. This is partly why highland Ethiopia remained the center of Arabica diversity for so long. The forests there weren't managed for coffee production in any industrial sense, they just happened to be exactly the environment the plant evolved in.
Colombia's Andean belt qualifies for Arabica cultivation. So do Brazil's highland regions, though Brazil's situation is complicated by the fact that it produces both species in different parts of the country. Honduras barely featured in specialty coffee discussions twenty years ago and now exports at a scale that surprises people, not because anything changed about the altitude, which was always there, but because the roads, processing infrastructure, and export networks took time to develop.
Research from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture and studies published in PLOS ONE suggest that somewhere between half and nearly ninety percent of currently viable Arabica growing land could become too warm by 2050 under higher warming scenarios. Farmers in both Colombia and Ethiopia are already moving their plots uphill to find temperatures that still work, which is a solution with an obvious geographic ceiling.
Robusta doesn't have these problems. Lower elevations, higher temperatures, more humidity, it handles all of it and produces more per hectare than Arabica does. Vietnam built one of the most rapid agricultural expansions in modern history around this fact. The Central Highlands were largely forested through the mid-twentieth century. Brazil produces large Robusta volumes too, marketed domestically as Conilon, and it shows up quietly in international blends that don't advertise the fact. Indonesia, India, and Uganda each contribute significantly from lowland regions where attempting Arabica would be a waste of time.
Below you can find a combined map that shows regions where Arabica and Robusta are grown.
Tea runs on a different geographic logic entirely. China and India lead in total production.
Assam in northeastern India is a wide river valley that absorbs monsoon rainfall heavily, producing a bold, malty black tea strong enough to hold up to milk, which probably explains how it became the backbone of so many British-style breakfast blends. Yunnan in southwestern China sits at much higher elevation and grows an almost bewildering range of types, from delicate greens to aged pu-erh pressed into cakes and stored for years. Darjeeling is globally famous and relatively modest in how much it actually produces. The muscatel character of a good first-flush depends on altitude, significant temperature swings between day and night, and a very specific seasonal timing connected to a small leafhopper called Empoasca flavescens that partially damages the leaves before harvest.
Kenya consistently appears near the top of global tea export rankings and almost never comes up in consumer conversations about the drink. The growing area in the highlands east of the Rift Valley is a fraction of what China or India cultivates, but the black tea it produces feeds directly into the large European breakfast brands that most people pour every morning without thinking about origin.
India and Vietnam both cultivate coffee and tea, which requires running two completely different agricultural systems within the same country. India's tea is in the northeast and east, mostly Assam and the Darjeeling hills, while the coffee is concentrated in the southern states of Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu. Vietnam grows Robusta in the southern highlands and tea further north. Kenya and Uganda each have a real stake in both markets.
By 2023, global coffee consumption had reached 10.71 billion kilograms. Tea came in at 7.09 billion. Those numbers have been moving in that direction for a while, and the acceleration isn't slowing down.
Related products on Amazon:
- Smithsonian Bird-Friendly Certified Organic Coffee
- Certified Organic Ethiopian Arabica Coffee, Single Origin
- Rainforest Alliance Certified Colombia Whole Bean Coffee
- Single Estate Darjeeling First Flush Tea, Loose Leaf
- Kenya Single Estate Black Tea, Loose Leaf
- Reusable Stainless Steel Coffee Filter (zero-waste brewing)
- Bamboo Loose Leaf Tea Infuser Set
- Eco-Friendly Coffee Makers for a Healthier Home Brew
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