Coffee production in Venezuela began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the Premontane shankarof the Andes mountains. José Gumilla, a Jesuit priest, is credited with introducing coffee into Venezuela, in 1732. Its production is attributed to the large demand for the product, coupled with cheap labour and low land costs. It was first exported to Brazil. Coffee production in Venezuela led to the "complex migration" of people to this region in the late nineteenth century. Though Venezuela was ranked close to Colombia at one time in coffee production, by 2001, it produced less than one percent of the world's coffee.
Geography
Coffee production occurs in the Coast Range and the western Andean region with the only requirements being sufficient top soil and moisture. The coffee production system followed in the Andes region, which is the premontane moist forest, is a multilayered system (3 to 4 layered canopies) in which there are multi-species of plants. In this system, trees provide the shade needed for growth of coffee. This region is a part in the three geographical regions of Venezuela namely, the Mountains and Caribbean Coastal region, the Llanos region, and the Orinoco River Delta region, and the Guayana region.
The plantations are generally in the altitudinal range of 1,000–5,000 feet (300–1,520 m), bordering with Colombia. Better grades are noted at elevations of 6,000 feet (1,800 m) or higher but these elevations are characterized by slower growth and lower productivity. The fertile region in the highland areas consisted of Táchira, Mérida, and Trujilo, known as the Andean frontier region, and are suitable for growing coffee which could be exported from the Maracaibo's port. This resulted in increased production of coffee in the 19th century. The Duaca region in particular is different from other coffee growing regions in the country; here the growers were, including the wealthy “haciendas”, till 1916, supported the privatization of land with the objective of forcing higher wages for the labour. It is also the region where, in the 1860s, coffee production boomed as the migrating peasants could resist the hegemony of the large land holders. However, this situation changed between 1908 and 1935 when there were political changes resulting in near total privatization of the land in favour of the haciendas resulting in loss of the “peasantry's power”.
The coffee growing area was also extended to marginal agroclimatic region in the elevation range of under 600m 600 metres (2,000 ft), called the premontane dry forest, though the area produced low yields (less than 300 kg per hectare each year), which was made good by the enterprising small farmers with crop diversification. Statistical survey has indicated that coffee plantations are generally in the elevation range of 800–1,700 metres (2,600–5,600 ft) on the hills of the Andean with slopes of 5 to 60%. The land holders were mostly small farmers who accounted for 87.5% of the total land holdings, with each holding of about 3.5 hectares (8.6 acres) under coffee and with traditional multilayered agroforestry practice.
As a perennial crop, the area covered under coffee was 280,000 hectares (690,000 acres) with the Andeas region alone accounting for 125,000 hectares (310,000 acres).