In the British Caribbean, which was more specialized in sugar production, the
coffee plantations evolved from intensive production (without nutrient
replenishment and high soil erosion rates) using slave labor to less intensive
systems with shade and other crops grown between the coffee plants (Lown-
des 1807; Smith 1998).
In South America, the type of coffee production system varied depending
on whether it was located on the Atlantic slope or the Pacific Andean slope. For
example, in the Guyanas in the eighteenth century and the beginning of the
nineteenth century, coffee was planted in full sun and was associated with
intensive land use and slave labor. Both the genetic material and the practice of
cultivating coffee under full sun appear to have been transferred to Suriname
and to the north of Brazil, then to the state of Rio de Janeiro, and then to São
Paulo (Cardoso and Pérez 1977). On the peasant farms and in the large hacien-
dasof the Andes in Colombia and Venezuela, bananas (Musaspp.) were used
as temporary shade, whereas legume trees (Inga laurinaand Erythrina fusca)
provided permanent shade. The use of coffee polycultures was a common prac-
tice on small peasant farms, with shade densities being lower in high, cool zones
than in warm, dry zones (Izard 1973; Ardao 1984; Rios de Hernández 1988).
In Central America, the use of shade in coffee plantations varied from one
coffee region to the next and even, within the same region, from one period
to the next (Duque 1938; Hearst 1929; Cardoso and Pérez 1977; Samper
1994). For example, between the end of the eighteenth century and 1870,
Costa Rica followed the French Antillean model of cultivating coffee in full
sun or minimal shade. As productivity declined (because of plantation aging
and more severe pest infestation), shade was introduced into the plantations
to the extent that in the last third of the nineteenth century, the use of shade
was common throughout the country. On the dry and hot Pacific coast of
Central America (i.e., El Salvador and Nicaragua), coffee was always grown
under a shade canopy (Samper 1994).
The technical intensification of coffee production accelerated in the twen-
tieth century in several parts of the world at varying rates and with marked dif-
ferences between countries and between different types of farms and farmers.
After the mid-twentieth century, new, shorter coffee varieties were introduced
in a number of regions; smaller coffee bushes permitted higher planting den-
sities, increasing self-shading and reducing the need for shade trees. These new
varieties produced higher yields but also necessitated a greater use of agro-
chemicals. Shade management was simplified in many areas and reduced to
the use of only a few species, mainly fast-growing leguminous trees (notably
various species of Inga, Erythrina,and Gliricidia) that rapidly resprouted after
crown pruning, fixed nitrogen, and could be propagated and managed easily.
Shade was eliminated altogether, and later reintroduced, in several coffee-
growing regions.
- Biodiversity Conservation in Neotropical Coffee Plantations 201