![]() After Spanish monarch Carlos III, who wanted to reduce the church’s influence in the Spanish realms, expelled the Jesuits, they abandoned their plantations, although Paraguayans still harvested the natural stands that grew in the Atlantic rainforest. After the Guaraní ignored a 1616 ban of the green leaf, Jesuit missionaries noticed its value to their indigenous laborers and planted it alongside other agricultural commodities at their missions it soon became a valuable export commodity for the missionaries, who could claim a tax exemption to the chagrin of profit-seeking Paraguayan merchants. Sixteenth-century Spanish colonizers in Paraguay marvelled at how the indigenous Guaraní people who imbibed the infusion could work longer and harder than them. Since mate production provides an economic incentive to reforest the Atlantic rainforest in Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, these emerging companies demonstrate how ecological restoration and profit can go hand in hand. Entrepreneurs have started to tap into the growing American market for alternative teas-and into Gen Z’s preference for more ecologically and socially conscious products-with shade-grown yerba mate. Yet mate’s global popularity has finally started to increase in the last decade or so. ![]() As a Paraguayan villager told Harvard’s ReVista, drinking mate “is such an intrinsic part of us that you really don’t think about it until somebody else points it out.” However, unlike other caffeinated drinks like Italian coffees and Chinese teas, mate has not largely made it past the Southern Cone and into the United States’ globalized drink palate, likely because it is an acquired taste: one self-described “reluctant” mate drinker described it as a mix of “green tea and coffee, with hints of tobacco and oak.” Misiones is not a hotbed of the coca trade, but rather a center of production for one of Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay’s most beloved commodities: yerba mate, the leaves used to prepare a herbal infusion called mate (pronounced mah-tay, with two syllables). As several local newspapers have reported, thefts of the province’s main agricultural commodity, often referred to simply as “the green leaf” or “green gold,” have risen, and authorities, despite making several arrests, are at a loss. Argentina’s Misiones province has a bit of a problem.
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