Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 8.1 a
Tea plantation recently harvested by machine, Malanda, Queensland. (©Drinnan).
b
Mechanical coffee harvesting, Atherton Tableland, Queensland. (©Drinnan)
categorized into plantation crops. These can be further categorized as beverage,
spice, sugar, fruit and nuts; oil and biofuel, and fibre and industrial crops.
Beverage Crops
Beverage crops, chiefly tea, coffee and cocoa, became rapidly industrialised from
the nineteenth century.
Tea (
Camellia sinensis
), native to northern Myanmar and southern Yunnan prov-
ince in China (Purseglove
1968
; Eden
1965
) was cultivated in south east China for
2 to 3 millennia in the WuYi mountains in Fuzian province China prior to the plants
distribution to other growing regions. The story of how tea departed China for north
east India with the aid of the British botanist, Robert Fortune (1812-1880) in 1848,
is enjoyably told by Rose (
2009
). Once tea was established in India by the East India
Company, the commercial stranglehold the Chinese had on the tea trade was bro-
ken. Successful cultivation and production of tea depended on cheap labour for hand
plucking the fresh shoots required to make tea. Tea plantations spread from India to
the colonial Malaya with production in the Cameron Highlands and then Tanzania,
Kenya, Indonesia and Russia. Newer centres of production include Australia (Drinnan
2008
), particularly following the development of mechanical harvesting (Fig.
8.1a
).
However, purists argue that the finest boutique teas are still picked by hand.
Coffee (
Coffea arabica
), native to the highlands of Ethiopia where it occurred
naturally in forests at altitudes between 1,200 and 2,000 m, was reportedly introduced
to Arabia by the fifteenth century (Haarer
1962
). Coffee spread rapidly via colonial-
isation (England, Dutch, French, Italian, Belgian, Germans and North Americans)
but is now produced dominantly by independent countries in Latin America (Topik
and Clarence-Smith
2003
; Bigger
2006
). The labour intensive nature of picking
coffee berries lead to plantation production methods. The development of coffee
harvesting machinery lead to expansion of the industry and the development of bou-
tique coffee production in high cost labour countries such as Australia (Fig.
8.1b
).
