CAFE GUATEMALA
- Fruit Routes
- Acrylic and mixed media on canvas
- 60 x 60 x 4 cm (23.6 x 23.6 x 1.5 in)
- Ref: 646627/319
£ 1,200.00
Coffee beans were discovered on the Ethiopian plateau in a region called Kaffa, which is where the name originates.
I discovered on a recent trip to Guatemala, now the tenth largest coffee exporter, that it is likely Jesuit missionaries introduced the beans to the country in the mid-18th century.
Today, about 500,000 families in Guatemala rely on the crop for their livelihood. However, it takes coffee trees four years to produce their first crop of beans while cocoa bushes can be harvested within one year.
In Costa Rica, where a shortage of labour restricted the size of estates, small farms and favourable working conditions have prevailed over the last century for the country’s coffee farmers.
