The Coffee Belt and Brazil

Only Inside the Bright Band

Coffee trees reached northern Brazil in 1727 and spread south. By the 1840s, Brazil grew more coffee than any other country. Most of the people who worked its huge coffee fields were enslaved people taken from Africa.

Why?Frost kills coffee trees, and they also struggle when it is too hot and dry. So they grow mostly around the equator, between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. That is the bright band on the screen.

Learn moreIn the first half of the 1800s alone, about 1.5 million Africans were forced to Brazil, and many worked on coffee farms. Brazil did not end slavery until 1888. The band is called the "coffee belt." Brazil still grows more than a third of the world's coffee.

When

1840 → 1888