Islamic world (Smith 1985). The agroecological needs of the Typica cultivar
(the main variety cultivated during the coffee expansion) are characteristic of
the Ethiopian hillsides where it originated, at 6°–9° north and 1,300–2,000
m altitude: moderate temperatures (lower and upper extremes of 4° and 31°C,
respectively, and means of 20° to 25°C, with hot days and cool nights),
1,500–1,800 mm of annual precipitation with a well-defined dry season of
4–5 months, and a photoperiod of 10.5 to 15 hours per day. In their wild
state, the Ethiopian coffee plants grew under a canopy of natural or modified
forests on hillsides and along riverbanks (Haile-Mariam 1973). When coffee
was introduced into Yemen (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), in the
extreme south of the Arabian Peninsula, with a drier climate and sandier soils
than in Ethiopia, it had to be cultivated under shade (Roque 1988). The con-
sumption and cultivation of coffee expanded south through the humid trop-
ics of Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, following the expansion
of the Islamic culture. Coffee was cultivated below shade in homegardens and
thinned forests. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, first the Dutch
and then the British promoted intensive coffee production under full sun in
India and Ceylon (Smith 1985; Clarence-Smith 1998; Kurian 1998;
Tharakan 1998).
In the Indonesian archipelago, coffee cultivation expanded under the colo-
nial Dutch regime from the end of the seventeenth century onward, with cof-
fee being cultivated under shade on small peasant farms. In the mid-
eighteenth century, there were three types of coffee systems: the colonial
model in high areas where forests were cleared and lines of coffee bushes and
shade trees were planted, coffee plantations planted as hedges, and coffee plan-
tations below natural forest. The last two systems were preferred by small
farmers because they allowed the simultaneous production of food crops (Fer-
nando 1998).
In the Americas, coffee growing began in the Caribbean in the nineteenth
century on plantations of various sizes and with distinct degrees of production
intensity, using slave labor. In Saint Domingue (now Haiti), the prevalent
plantation type was that of an intensively cultivated plantation, without shade,
but with trees planted in field borders or in widely spaced lines throughout the
plantations as windbreaks. This Antillean model of coffee plantation (with lit-
tle or no shade, intensive cultivation with high labor inputs, and wet process-
ing of coffee beans, which greatly increased the cup quality of the coffee) was
introduced to Cuba by French emigrants after the Haitian revolution and the
abolition of slavery at the end of the eighteenth century (Laborie 1797). Seeds
and coffee technology were exported from Cuba to the rest of the Spanish ter-
ritories in Central and South America. In Spanish Puerto Rico, coffee was
cultivated under a planted and managed canopy of Ingaspp., where densities
varied with the altitude of the plantation (Díaz-Hernández 1983; Picó 1983).
200 III. The Biodiversity of Agroforestry Systems