The Coffee Era

The Export Development Board dates the start of coffee in Ceylon to about 1780, when the Dutch began planting it as a commercial crop. The British then took it over. A University of Exeter history records that both had tried and failed to grow coffee on the coast, and that the first successful commercial planting was made by George Bird at Gannoruwa, beside the Peradeniya botanical gardens, in the cooler hills.

The Sri Lanka Tea Board begins its own history of tea with coffee. Governor Edward Barnes, who arrived in 1824, saw coffee as a way to make the colony pay for itself. Land in the central hills was sold cheaply, official funds went into experiments, and roads were built, including the trunk road from Kandy to Colombo. His term ended in 1831.

In 1838 the abolition of slavery in Jamaica caused the collapse of that country's coffee industry, and Ceylon coffee boomed. The University of Exeter history counts between 500 and 600 plantations by 1846, owned by individuals and agency houses, in what came to be known as the coffee mania. Workers came on foot from South India for the four-month harvesting season.

A recession in Britain in 1846 brought a slump of some three years, and planting then resumed. The Exeter history gives 176,000 acres under coffee by 1869 and 275,000 acres by 1880. In the mid-1870s, according to the Tea Board, Ceylon became the world's largest producer of coffee. Railways and roads were built into the coffee districts, and the port of Colombo was developed.

In 1869 the first signs of a new plant disease, coffee rust, appeared on a plantation in Madulsima. The fungus was described by the English mycologist Michael Joseph Berkeley and his collaborator Christopher Edmund Broome from specimens collected in Ceylon by George H.K. Thwaites. They named it Hemileia vastatrix. A Penn State University account explains that vastatrix refers to the devastating nature of the disease.

In 1879 the government of Ceylon set up a commission, and Harry Marshall Ward was sent to the plantations. He linked the collapse of the crop to the fungus and to the practice of planting coffee densely as a single crop, but the epidemic was too far advanced. The Tea Board records that the blight took slightly more than a decade to wipe out the coffee enterprise.

The early 1880s were lean years. The Tea Board describes plantations sold cheaply, runs on the banks in Colombo and failed experiments with indigo and cinchona. At Loolecondera, a coffee estate in the Kandy hills, James Taylor had been growing tea since the 1860s, and planters came to learn from him.

More than 120,000 hectares, or 300,000 acres, were stripped of dead and dying coffee bushes and replanted with tea. Within a decade a new plantation enterprise had been built. The University of Exeter history notes that the land clearances, roads, railways and agency houses created for coffee became the foundation of the tea industry. It records that coffee production had halved by the 1880s and withered to almost nothing in the 1890s.

Coffee did not disappear. The Export Development Board records that land under coffee fell from a peak of 275,000 acres to 11,392 acres by the 1900s, and that cultivation continued on a much smaller scale. Interest in Ceylon coffee revived from about the mid-1990s.

Arabica and Robusta are the two types grown commercially, and coffee is exported as whole beans, raw or roasted, and as ground coffee. The Department of Export Agriculture advises that Arabica suits cool climates at elevations above 800 metres, and that coffee can be grown as a mixed crop with pepper, clove, nutmeg, coconut and tea. It lists several high-yielding varieties, some of them resistant to coffee rust. The Export Development Board names Bandarawela and Kotmale among the growing areas.