Which country produces the most coffee?

Brazil, by a distance - around a third of the world's coffee, and it has held the position for over 150 years. The scale is why Brazilian frosts move global prices: a cold night in Minas Gerais can be felt in the cost of a cup on another continent.

That dominance was built on slavery. Coffee expanded across Brazil through the nineteenth century on enslaved labour, and Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish it, in 1888 - it received more enslaved Africans than anywhere else in the hemisphere by a wide margin. The plantation system that made it the world's coffee supplier is inseparable from that fact.

Coffee itself is Ethiopian, cultivated first in Yemen, and it reached the Americas through a remarkably narrow bottleneck - much of the coffee grown in Latin America descends from a very small number of plants taken from a Dutch and then French collection in the early 1700s. That thin genetic base is now the industry's central worry, because arabica has little variation to draw on against leaf rust and a warming climate, and most of the wild diversity is still in Ethiopian forest that is itself under pressure.