As farmers become more dependent on the genetics supply industry, they lose the ability to nurture that development process. Fowler and Mooney point out that approximately 97 percent of the varieties on a 1903 USDA vegetable list are now extinct. The consequences of such uniformity were demonstrated by the 1970 corn blight, which destroyed over 15 percent of the U.S. crop. In the wake of the corn blight, a 1972 U.S. National Academy of Sciences report, Genetic Vulnerability of Major Crops, revealed that the United States was shockingly reliant on a handful of seed varieties for its major crops. Tracing the origins of Latin America's coffee industry illustrates how dependent whole nations and regions of the world have become on a few crop varieties.
Coffee is native to Ethiopia.
Over a thousand years ago, Arab and Persian traders brought the bean to Yemen for cultivation. The Dutch inherited these coffee plants when they took over Sri Lanka from the Portugese. The Dutch replanted one tree in Indonesia, and in 1706 a cutting from that tree was shipped to the Amsterdam Botanical Garden where it still resides. Healthy progeny from that tree were subsequently sent as a gift to King Louis XIV of France. The Dutch, nine years after receiving the initial cuttings, also sent cuttings from the Amsterdam tree to their colony in Suriname.