On August 21, 2002, the executive director of the International Coffee Organization, Néstor Osorio, appears at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. He submits a document there.

Since then, no one has disputed its figures. Here they are.

In the early 1990s, producing countries took in 10 to 12 billion dollars in exports, for retail sales of about 30 billion. In 2002, retail exceeds 70 billion, and producers receive only 5.5 of it.

Read these four numbers twice. The pie has more than doubled, and the share of those who grow the coffee has been cut in half.

The composite indicator price, which was 109 cents in 1998, falls below 48 cents in 2002. It is the lowest in real terms in a hundred years.

The cause is mechanical: five consecutive years of surplus. In 2001-2002, the world produces about 113 million bags for a consumption of a little over 106 million, with 40 million bags of stocks weighing on top of that. Production grows by 3.6% a year, demand by 1.5%. Two things lie behind this runaway: the rapid expansion of Vietnam and the new Brazilian plantations.

What remains is what it does to people, and this is where Osorio's document stops being a market note. More than 125 million people then depend on coffee. Where costs are low and the exchange rate favorable, in Brazil, they survive. Where coffee is the cash crop of a subsistence farm, in Africa and Asia, there is no longer enough to pay for medicine or school. And where debt is added, the farm is abandoned, or growers switch to proscribed crops.

ICO, The Global Coffee Crisis: A Threat to Sustainable Development, London, Aug. 21, 2002, pp. 1-2; Daily Coffee News, Sept. 4, 2018 (accessed Sept. 7, 2026)

The composite price does not go back above a dollar a pound until 2007. It is in this trough that most of the instruments the trade now points to are born: Cup of Excellence (1999), raised certified minimum prices, the sustainability programs of the big groups, the term “direct trade.” None of these instruments acts on the base price; all of them act on the gap.

ICO 2002; LC ch. 18 (analysis)