world coffee market

Snip

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
From the "Re: problem with St Helena" thread:
[snipped Charlie's doomsday scenario of bad coffee for all]
As long as a market for premium coffee exists, there will be folks willing
to produce for it.  At SM, we pay $4-5 per pound, while 2 pound cans in the
local grocery are about $6.  This extra 30-60% price will motivate some one
to produce superior coffee, even if it's at lower volumes and even higher
prices.
I don't like the idea that I get cheap coffee b/c some third world folks are
going bankrupt, but it's true.  I drink fair trade coffee when I can, and
I've ordered some fair trade coffee from SM.  Fair trade aside, coffee
prices aren't going back up until the supply falls, in other words until
folks are driven out of the business.  I'm sure that we'll lose a lot of
quality producers, but it's not reasonable to think the market would let all
the quality stuff go away.  Not when that extra profit is available.  The
coffee producers will be looking for a way to differentiate their product,
and having these specialty coffees is a great way to do it.
I haven't researched this issue in depth, but one of the news reports on NPR
interviewed a guy from Starbucks who claimed that a big part of the problem
was that the market didn't adequately measure quality.  I find this hard to
believe, but apparantly the Vietnamese robusto beans (which frequently
contain twigs and pebbles) are not sold differently than quality arabica
beans.  If this problem were fixed, everything would probably work out much
better.  Bad beans would be cheap, good beans would be expensive.  The price
system is at the heart of the free market, and if that's broken...
Maybe what we need is some kind of uniform coffee grading via some world
wide coffee association.  Such a system would ultimately benefit everyone,
although there would be some unhappiness for a while as people tried to get
their beans graded higher than they deserved.  I'm sure there would be loud
claims of injustice when cheap beans got down graded.
tmk
--
Ted Kostek
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"Always keep in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important
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