This makes about as much sense as saying that rising fish prices are not a problem because there's never been so much good caviar. Commodity coffee is a separate market from specialty; and rising prices will have the usual middle range effect -- a glut of low quality coffee in three to five years time, followed by another price collapse..

I'm all for specialty coffee, and I agree that it's a golden age for high end coffee. But that is because every coffee grower with the ability moved into specialty coffee when commodity coffee prices collapsed in the 90s. My hope is that specialty has become as separate from commodity coffee as caviar is from canned tuna.

This never used to be true when the same farm produced maybe 20% percent specialty and 80% commodity coffee. In Central America, farmers know the writing is on the wall for labor intensive commodity coffee, since you're competing with mechanized South American farms and quasi-slave labor in Vietnam. So they've changed practices to sharply raise the level of specialty they harvest each year. In El Salvador, the percentage of coffee higher than C grade is up to 80%. So there, I think the markets have separated. But in Brazil and Columbia, on the large plantations, I think they can still easily switch between producing labor intensive specialty coffees and more mechanized commodity coffee. So there the price changes may lead to a reduction in high quality coffees. I do not know how the price changes will play in Africa.

I'm not sure what will happen overall; it requires a lot more in-detail knowledge than the article gives or that I possess.

For instance, one effect of the price collapse has been the appearance of "designer Brasils" like Daterra. Daterra is a set of large plantations that used to produce commodity coffee. Producing specialty is more expensive for them, and if commodity prices rise, they might be better off switching back. How much of a price change would this take? How many farms are in a similar position? I don't know. It's the kind of information that only becomes available when it's commissioned as expensive market research, so I'm guessing Nestle and Starbucks know, but not too many others.

I doubt there will be much effect at the very highest, auction and COE coffee level; so us "coffee-caviar" swilling hobbyists should be OK.