Answer:
The Columbian Exchange was an important event in the history of the ecology, agriculture and culture of our world. The expression is used for the enormous exchange of agricultural varieties, diseases and cultures between the Old World and the New World after the discovery of America in 1492. In that year, Christopher Columbus' journey of discovery led to an era of widespread contact between the Eastern and Western Hemisphere.
This exchange of animal and plant species had a major impact on life in Europe, America, Africa and Asia. Food that people had never seen before became public food. For example, before 1492 there were no potatoes outside of South America. In the nineteenth century, Ireland was so dependent on the potato that a scarcity of it led to a great famine.
The first European import, the horse, changed the lives of Amerindian tribes on the Great Plains who could give up their nomadic lifestyle and hunt bison from horses. Tomato sauce, made from tomatoes from the New World, became an Italian trademark. Coffee and sugar cane from Asia were intensively grown crops on Latin American plantations. Before the Colombian exchange, there were no oranges in Florida, no bananas in Honduras, no rubber trees in Africa, no cows in Texas, no donkeys in Mexico and no chocolate in Switzerland.
