Coffee is one of the world’s most important primary commodities due to being one of the world’s most popular beverages. In total, 6.7 million tons of coffee were produced annually in 1998–2000, and the forecast is a rise to 7 million tons annually by 2010. Coffee also has several types of classifications used to determine environmental and labor standards.
Brazil remains the largest coffee exporting nation, but in recent years the green coffee market has been flooded by large quantities of robusta beans from Vietnam. Many experts believe the giant influx of cheap green coffee bean after the collapse of the International Coffee Agreement of 1975–1989 with Cold War pressures led to the prolonged pricing crisis from 2001 to 2004. In 1997 the “c” price of coffee in New York broke US$3.00/lb, but by late 2001 it had fallen to US$0.43/lb.
Robusta coffees (traded in London at much lower prices than New York’s Arabica) are preferred by large industrial clients (multinational roasters, instant coffee producers, etc.) because of their lower cost.
The farmers in many parts of the Third World responded to the price crash by forming co-ops to bargain on the world market. This was responsible for major coffee companies agreeing to pay 3-4 times the price of coffee that they were paying the individual farmers. Four single roaster companies buy more than 50% of all of the annual production: Kraft, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, Sara Lee[citations needed]. The preference of the “Big Four” coffee companies for cheap robusta is believed by many to have been a major contributing factor to the crash in coffee prices, and the demand for high-quality arabica coffee beans is only slowly recovering. After the crash, many coffee farmers in Africa, Indonesia and South and Central America lost their livelihoods, or turned to illicit crops such as coca to earn a living. The Dutch brand ‘Max Havelaar’ started the concept of fair trade labeling, which attempted to remedy the situation by guaranteeing coffee growers a negotiated pre-harvest price. Another issue with coffee is ecological: the American Birding Association has led a campaign for sustainably harvested, shade-grown and organic coffees vs. the newer mono-cropped full-sun varieties, which lead to deforestation and loss of bird habitat.
Coffee ingestion on average is about a third that of tap water in most of North America and Europe. The United States consumes around six billion gallons of coffee a year.[41] In 2002 in the U.S., average coffee consumption was 22.1 gallons per person.
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