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In-Depth Information
suaded the captain of HMS Monarch to transport several hundred sacks of Costa Rican
coffee to London, percolating the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
The Costa Rican coffee boom was on. The drink's quick fix made it popular among
working-class consumers in the industrializing north. The aroma of riches lured a wave of
enterprising German immigrants, enhancing technical and financial skills in the business
sector. By century's end, more than one-third of the Central Valley was dedicated to coffee
cultivation, and coffee accounted for more than 90% of all exports and 80% of foreign-
currency earnings.
The coffee industry in Costa Rica developed differently from those in the rest of Central
America. As elsewhere, there arose a group of coffee barons, elites that reaped the rewards
for the export bonanza. But Costa Rican coffee barons lacked the land and labor to cultiv-
ate the crop. Coffee production is labor intensive, with a long and painstaking harvest sea-
son. The small farmers became the principal planters. The coffee barons, instead, mono-
polized processing, marketing and financing. The coffee economy in Costa Rica created a
wide network of high-end traders and small-scale growers, whereas in the rest of Central
America a narrow elite controlled large estates worked by tenant laborers.
Coffee wealth became a power resource in politics. Costa Rica's traditional aristocratic
families were at the forefront of the enterprise. At midcentury, three-quarters of the coffee
barons were descended from just two colonial families. The country's leading coffee ex-
porter at this time was President Juan Rafael Mora Porras (1849-59), whose lineage went
back to the colony's founder, Juan Vásquez de Coronado. Mora was overthrown by his
brother-in-law after the president proposed to form a national bank independent from the
coffee barons. The economic interests of the coffee elite would thereafter become a prior-
ity in Costa Rican politics.
The coffee-processing cooperative Coopedota, located in Costa Rica's Valley of the
Saints (famous for growing delicious highland coffee) launched the country's first carbon-
neutral coffee in 2011, certified to the British Standards Institution's PAS2060 specifica-
tions for carbon neutrality.
Banana Empire
The coffee trade unintentionally gave rise to Costa Rica's next export boom - bananas.
Getting coffee out to world markets necessitated a rail link from the central highlands to
 
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