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  • History
    • Topic XI

    The economics of coffee

    A coffee is sold before it exists, at a price that no one in the trade controls. This plate follows the coffee trade from the market courtyard of Bayt al-Faqih described in 1712 to today's markets: the coffee kings and their corners, the birth of the exchanges and their panics, Brazilian valorization and wartime controls, the quotas of the International Agreement and its breakdown, the 2001 crisis, the green coffee traders, cooperatives and roasters who concentrate the chain, the Incoterms that say who pays what from the farm to the warehouse, climate and European compliance. Today's prices and the share that goes to the producer are not here: they live in the viewpoints, signed and dated. After La Roque (1716), Thurber (1881), Walsh (1894), Ukers (1922, ch. XXXIII, XXXIV and XXXV), the Coffee Guide of the International Trade Centre (2021), the ICO reports (2025-2026), the USDA and the Incoterms 2020 rules of the International Chamber of Commerce.

    Wall of jute sacks stacked in staggered rows, each bearing the words “Federación Nacional de Cafeteros” and two red and green borders.
    Rows of sacks of the National Federation of Coffee Growers of ColombiaDiego Abello Rico, Pexels License

    The 11 sections of this plate

    Each section has its own page. The first sentence says what you will find there.

    1. 01Before the exchange: Mocha, the brokers and the right not to comeThe first coffee market for which we have a precise description is that of Bayt al-Faqih, in the Yemeni plain, visited by French merchants from Saint-Malo in 1712 and described by Jean de La Roque in 1716.
    2. 02The century of kings: Arnold, the syndicate and the crash of 1880-1881The nineteenth century fits in a single price series: that of Rio “fair to prime” in New York, given by Thurber and taken up by Walsh.
    3. 03The exchange and its panics: New York 1882, Le Havre, Hamburg, LondonEurope follows, place by place.
    4. 04Brazilian valorization and wartime controls, 1906-1944The mechanism that will govern the whole twentieth century of coffee is born of a crop that is too good.
    5. 05The International Coffee Agreement, 1962-1989, and its breakdownAfter the Second World War, the instrument changes scale: it is no longer a state and its bankers, but producers and consumers together.
    6. 06The 2001 crisisOn August 21, 2002, the executive director of the International Coffee Organization, Néstor Osorio, appears at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.
    7. 07Green coffee traders, cooperatives and the institutions of originBetween the one who exports and the one who roasts, there is a trade the public has never heard of and without which nothing would arrive: trading.
    8. 08IncotermsA green coffee contract often fits on a single line: a quantity, a quality “as per sample,” a shipment period, a payment condition, and three letters followed by the name of a port.
    9. 09The industrial roastersAt the other end of the chain, among those who roast and sell, concentration is stronger still than in trading.
    10. 10Climate, the EUDR and the cost of complianceOn climate, the studies all say the same thing in direction, and rarely the same thing in magnitude.
    11. 11Archive platesEngravings and photographs from William Ukers's book All About Coffee (1922), now in the public domain.

    Elsewhere on the site, the passages that deal with the same things as this page. Computed from the text, not picked by hand.

    The chronicleQuotas, instant coffee and the invention of qualityBoth mention agreement, agreements and frost.What lies aheadRegulation: the European deforestation regulationBoth mention loss and prices.The chronicleThe 2001 slump, specialty and climateBoth mention minimums, prices and trade.The chronicleThe century of the machine, of Brazil and of the world marketBoth mention banks and prices.The cupThe 2004 scoresheet and what 80 points are worthBoth mention score, international and prices.What lies aheadWhat the models predict for 2050Both mention climate, species and altitude.
    © 2026 Marco De Sousa Rosa · PXL RoastersTexts under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · tools: all rights reserved · images: see the provenanceHome · Colophon · Site map