Coffee History Summary

Section one of the Coffee Book delivers a detailed account on the coffee history. It opens with Islamic legends, which link the coffee bush to Ethiopia from where coffee seeds were collected and cultivated in Yemen. At the beginning, coffee was eaten for energy and medicament before being made a drink by Islamic monks. The authors take the reader on a journey of Coffee drink from the Arab world to Europe and America where coffee houses opened and became meetings places for political and economic interaction. Their emergence transformed the social and political behaviours. The Arabs formed their rituals around coffee beverage, which was considered as a substitute for prohibited alcohol drinks. In Europe, the consecration of coffee beverage by …show more content…
They note the dominance of local exporters and intermediaries who account for 6% of the roast retail coffee value (Fair Trade Foundation, 2012). A study done on the coffee value chain suggests 87% of the retail cost of roasted coffee is retained by roasters and retailers whereas smallholders who produce 80% of global coffee supply capture only 7% (International Trade Centre, 2011). Not only are smallholders "at a disadvantage in global markets" but they face "the boom and bust cycles in commodity prices." (Sick, 2008). Indeed, coffee prices are volatile and fluctuate with the weather conditions, the entry of new producers into the global markets as well as change in coffee supply policy. The authors show how major weather events in Brazil, Guatemala and Colombia cause supply shortage and price spike, which prompt overproduction and low prices. They note the attempts made by cartels to cartelize global prices by limiting supply and stimulating demand. The collapse of cartelized prices in the 1990s opens a free market and brings back the cyclical behaviour. The authors examine the challenge faced by coffee producers, following the coffee crisis, with the emergence of Vietnam as a coffee power. From producing less than 0.1% of global production in the 1980s, Vietnam exceeds 13% the world production by 2000, causing an unprecedented oversupply of coffee in global markets, provoking the fall of coffee prices below record low. The authors discuss the impacts of mass production on coffee producing countries. The imperfect competition in global markets forced farmers to turn towards intensive farming techniques to produce higher volume, lower cost coffee (Buzzanell, 2002). Such production techniques cause the loss of shade trees that conserve the tropical biodiversity and protect the micro-climate. Moreover, the