In Vera’s paper, she writes: “What is clear, looking at supply and demand, is that in the foreseeable future, a significant long-term rise in coffee prices is unlikely, despite temporary surges.” While there is talk about paying more for the things we enjoy and bringing about equity through rising prices, in coffee that just hasn’t happened.Īnd yet, coffee has gotten more expensive on the consumer end. These numbers are not adjusted for inflation. In 1977, a pound of green coffee cost just above $2. In fact, coffee was more expensive in the 1970s than it is now. It could be argued that this is a distribution issue: To create more equity across the supply stream, we should shift the distribution of value to coffee-producing countries we should pay more for coffee and be willing to sacrifice a percentage of our market share to do so. This extraction of value is a relic of colonialism-look at any agricultural product, particularly those grown in formerly colonized countries, and you’ll see the same patterns. While this is a simplification of the coffee supply stream, there’s nothing in this model that suggests that 90% of coffee’s value would or should be created in consuming countries, far from where it originates. When that coffee reaches consuming countries, it’s roasted and sold to customers. So here I am, and I am thinking, “How do we ever change that?”Ĭoffee is grown, processed, and prepared for export within producing countries. So apparently 90% of the value is being produced in consuming countries. And then the only reward, so to say, is 10% of this $200 billion value. So here we are producing these great coffees in all these countries. And then seeing that’s just $20 billion of $200 billion just floored me. I was floored by one of the key points that they were stating: Basically, 10% of the value of coffee is for green-coffee-producing countries. I think one of the best studies-I would say definitely the one that gave me more to think about-has been The Coffee Barometer. Her research was prompted by a study she read: On the latest episode of Boss Barista, I talked to Vera Espíndola Rafael, a development economist who wrote a paper called “A Business Case to Increase Specialty Coffee Consumption in Producing Countries.” She argues that coffee-producing countries should strategize to promote in-country consumption-and that doing so would mean holding onto more of the value of the coffee they cultivate. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos makes $149,353 per minute while the average Amazon employee made an annual salary of $29,007 in 2020. This rhetoric is how we justify CEO billionaires raking in exorbitant amounts of money while their employees struggle to make ends meet at just above minimum wage. Meritocracy-splashed together with capitalism-would have you believe that the value of a product is correlated with the individual effort, talent, and amount of risk required when crafting it. What is an item-a consumer good, a handmade product, a cup of coffee- really worth? And as a given product goes from one hand to the next, how is the value of that labor determined?
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