Coffee production in the Melian Isles

The tropical and subtropical highlands of the Melian Isles are the only coffee-growing region in the Kiravian Federacy. Coffee is an extremely popular beverage in Great Kirav and the Colonies, and the cultivation of coffee beans for sale in the Federacy's more populated temperate regions has been a lucrative industry and a key pillar of the islands' economy since the 1640s anno Domini. The Melians' annual output of coffee is far too small to satisfy the enormous demand: the vast majority of coffee beans sold in the Home Islands are imported from Cartadania and Heku, with Melian plantations accounting for only a fraction of the total. Nonetheless, gradual improvements in growing practices, technology, and genetic engineering have done much to improve the archipelago's coffee yields in recent decades despite constraints on land and labour.

Coffee is believed to have first arrived in the Melians in the early 18th century anno Domini, brought from the mountain slopes of equatorial Punth by Pashtun merchants. The first large-scale cultivation was undertaken on the latifundia estates of native Melote nobles, and had become commercially viable by 1776, when Varisavius Leonoix, a Bérasar-based trader, sailed the first shipment of dry-roasted Arabica beans from Zirapzis (Coscivian: Sirapsiv) to Great Kirav. Although Melian civilisation had been engaged in commercial and cultural exchange with the Coscivian societies of Kiravia and the Dysona Islands for centuries prior, it was the opening of the coffee trade that first encouraged Coscivians to begin settling in the archipelago, primarily in the cooler altitudes better suited to the natural temperaments of both the Coscivians and their prized coffee trees. Furthermore, it was interest in coffee (as well as other tropical commodities, such as [idk coca probably]) that motivated the Court of Trade to coërce the various Melote city-states into unequal treaties subjecting them to Kiravian suzerainty and trading monopolies.