Can Brazil take over the world?

There's a lot of coffee in the world. You could honestly say it grows on trees. It grows on trees in just about every tropical and semi-tropical country in the world. You can walk into any coffee specialty store and find coffee from the far-flung fields of Colombia, Guatemala, Kenya, Vietnam,

Oddly enough, however, you probably won't find a coffee identified as originating from the world's largest producer and largest exporter, Brazil. The reasons are rather complex. They involve politics, technology, price, quality, Big Brother, Mother Nature, and Tio Juan Valdez. Together these factors have all but plotted to hold back the giant of coffee. But if the business continues in its current direction, those same factors may soon pull together to put Brazil into the ranks of the most valued coffees in the world. Brazil's day is coming. The sleeping giant is awakening. All it needs is a good cup of coffee. Mother Nature loves Brazilian coffee.

There is no accurate way to refer to Brazilian coffee as a single product; it's a big country, almost as big as the continental United States. Its coffees grow in regions with distinctly different altitudes, soils, and subclimates. In fact, microclimates following creeks and wrapping around hills can let one farm's coffee dry on the trunk while neighboring farms scramble to beat the frost and get their beans onto and off the patio before rains ruin it all.

Brazil is not the vast rainforest (or former rainforest) that many people assume it is. Its southern areas - especially the states of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais - can look like anything from well kempt Amish territory to fairyland hillsides draped in fog and graced with scattered palms and massive fruit trees. The infrastructure in that quarter of the country is an anomaly in South America, with nicely paved roads, cellular phone service just about everywhere, high-tech cars that run on alcohol distilled from sugar cane, and mechanical coffee pickers that would leave Juan Valdez in the dust. The qualities of coffee range from lousy to astounding. They are generally broken down into regional distinctions. Along the fertile, temperate belt that roughly follows the border between Minas Gerais and Sao Paulo, it is the Cerrado, the Sul De Minas and the Alta Mogiana regions that are the most widely prized.