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Show BRAZIL IS LAND OF COFFEE More Than Half of All That Is Consumed Con-sumed In the World Is Grown There. The custom of coffee drinking Is relatively of rather recent development develop-ment among peoples of Europe and their descendants in America, says H. W. Van Dyke, in "Through South America." For some reason, for a long time after it made its way west from Arabia and Turkey. It was under un-der the ban of the church. Maybe this was because of its Mohammedan orisin. It wss not until 1652 that the first house that made a specialty of serving serv-ing coffee was opened In London, and about the same time it was introduced intro-duced In France. From then on It has spread until the amount now consumed con-sumed the world over Is simply enormous, enor-mous, especially in the United States, where we take somewhere near half of all that is grown. At first it came only from northern Africa, Arabia and Turkey; then the Dutch began experimenting and succeeded suc-ceeded In cultivating It in Java, and the French in the West Indies. For a while these were the principal sources of supply. The story goes that In 1760 a Portuguese, Portu-guese, Joao Alberto Castello Branco, planted a tree In Rio, and from that small start, thanks to its peculiarly favorble soil and climate. Brazil soon outstripped the others and took the lead. On the uplands of Sao Paulo more than half of all the coffee consumed in the world is grown. There are between be-tween 15,000 and 20.000 cafezals, or plantations, employing hundreds of thousands of laborers. Some of the plantations are so vast that they grow millions of trees. Here it is that most of the immigrants flock. |