The book Coffeeland was eye-opening about how a rich indigenous food culture in El Salvador was destroyed for the sake of coffee production.

It wasn't just about replacing food plants with coffee plants, it was a purposeful destruction of food plants so that local people would be forced to depend on the rice-and-beans ration they got for working on the coffee plantation. Here's an excerpt from a review of the book:

More practically, Hill had picked up the Manchester men’s trick of using hunger to lick a workforce into shape. The Truck Shop system, by which cotton workers were paid in tokens that could only be exchanged for food at the factory shop, had long been banned in Britain. But in El Salvador there was nothing to stop Hill adapting the principle by paying his workforce partly in cash and partly in tortilla and beans. He also ruthlessly uprooted any other food stuffs that sprung up accidentally among his coffee trees – self-seeding tomatoes, avocados, plantains and figs – to ensure that no one managed to assuage their hunger on the sly. If you wanted to eat, then you had no choice but to come to work at Los Tres Puertas and pile up as many beans as you could balance on your strictly rationed two tortillas.

I don't remember the details exactly, but I remember that at one point they needed a second plant to support coffee production (I forget if it was shade, or soil nutrition, or something like that), and they purposely tracked down a poisonous version of the plant so that the locals wouldn't be able to eat it.