Yeah it is happening, my favorite local roaster has risen two dollars a pound, but they were already pretty reasonable so it's not too bad yet. Not to mention that Starbucks is creating their own coffee farms you have to know they are worried about it; http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142...22088.html.

IMO, this has nothing to do with global warming, and very little with the weather. Instead, coffee has the mother of all boom-bust cycles, since there is a lag of about seven years for a signal in the market to change production capacity. In coffee, the production capacity is the number of mature trees, and they take about six years from planting to first crop.

Ten years ago, the price of coffee was at the crisis point below 1 dollar, farmers were abandoning their land, and free market mavens were busting Fair Trade's chops for demanding the ridiculous break-even price of $1.35 and trying to keep farmers on the land rather than allowing them to make the economically rational decision of move to favelas or switch to opium growing. Fortunately ( ), a lot did move to the cities or grew opium, so now the price is up to $3 per pound.

Twenty years ago the price of coffee was at the crisis point of over $3 per pound. The development mavens and large companies, notably Nescafe, started growing robusta in Vietnam and deforested stretches of Brazil; while the silly goo-goos (Chicagoese for do-gooders) were warning of the consequences of bypassing and bankrupting traditional farmers. Fortunately ( ) nobody listened, and this bit of brilliant free market economics created the 1999 crash (i,e, the crisis in the above paragraoh)

There is little in the world that is as stupid and brutal as these asinine short term responses to long term agricultural cycles. This time around, we're going to see large stretches of South China getting Robusta plantings. Nescafe and the UN are both busy with this brilliant nugget of economic development. But short of a single coffee cartel regulating the global supply, people's and company's decentralized decisions will always respond the to the short term incentives and problems, and continue to cope with one crisis by creating the seeds of the next one.

If you are still around, you heard it here first: the price crash coffee crisis of 2020.

another_jim wrote:If you are still around, you heard it here first: the price crash coffee crisis of 2020.

And yet again, it will be nothing new or extraordinary. I agree that 8/9 years is a bit generous...