The $8 latte

Attention coffee lovers! The integrity, the very existence of your favorite beverage is at stake! Don't let the international coffee cartel take your cup from you! Go to your neighborhood barista and demand to pay more for your coffee NOW!

No, this isn't an April Fools' joke. The world coffee market is in crisis, threatening the farmers who grow the world's premium beans with economic disaster, and it's up to lovers of a fine cup of joe to save them.

We have some unusual allies in this campaign. Even leaders of the American gourmet coffee industry—people you'd think would be delighted to see the price of their raw material fall—spent a lot of time at their annual trade meeting in Miami this February discussing ways of keeping the price they pay for green coffee beans up.

And specialty coffee retailers, long a leaderless collection of jealously independent free agents, are beginning to realize that in the current economic crisis, big guys like Starbucks and the little roastery round the corner have common interests.

It's hip for Seattleites to think of Starbucks as a soulless marketing machine, but if they'd heard CEO Howard Schultz's address to a March meeting of the National Coffee Association (NCA), they might have had a shock. The NCA represents the really big coffee companies, the multinationals like Nestl頴hat make Starbucks' bottom line look like a latte stand's.

Pacing the stage like a televangelist, Schultz issued a kind of ultimatum to his mass-market brethren that they must begin to strike "a balance between profitability and humanity." "The consumer is performing a cultural audit," he went on to say, according to a March 8 Reuters dispatch: "Authenticity is the number one rule for the day in business with the customer." If coffee companies big and small don't start acting like good international citizens, coffee could go the way of other commodities like steel and copper, becoming an economic millstone instead of a source of profits for all involved in the trade.

Specialty coffee is big business. In 2001, U.S. cafes, kiosks, and carts pushed nearly $7 billion worth of the beverage, while retailers totted up sales of nearly $4 billion. But an $11 billion market ain't beans (sorry) compared to total U.S. imports in the same period of 3 billion pounds of beans, mostly destined for bottles and cans in supermarkets and for low-end commercial use. The U.S. consumes less than a fifth of the world coffee market, and most of the world's annual 16-billion-pound coffee output is crap. It doesn't even come from the same species of bush as the best arabica coffee, but from an inferior relative, coffea robusta, discovered about a century ago in the Congo. But in the weird world of commodity trading, that makes no difference.

Commodity traders, operating in millions of units with every trade, don't want to know anything about what they trade but its price per unit. If the number next to the cursor on the screen says coffee is worth 40 cents a pound today, that's what it's worth, and don't give me any guff about a subtle aroma reminiscent of hazelnuts.

BUT THAT DOESN'T make sense, right? Why should the price of crummy coffee beans affect the price of really good coffee, coffee that people in Seattle or Copenhagen are happy to pay $11 or $12 a pound for? Well, for the very, very best coffee—or at least the most prestigious, like Hawaiian Kona or Jamaican Blue Mountain—it doesn't.

But most good coffee isn't grown on such fancy and well-branded patches. (A lot of what's sold under those labels isn't grown there, either—but that's another sad story.) Most top-grade coffee is grown by small family producers on anonymous little patches of Guatemala (or Kenya, or Sulawesi), where the combination of soil and climate, sun and shade are just right to produce a premium berry.

Coffee from the field next door may not be a quarter as good, but by the time all the berries from all the fields on all the farms in that valley have been hauled away to a central location to be processed, any distinction between one bean and the next has been lost. It's all plain "Guatemala" and worth $1, 75 cents, 50 cents, 40 cents: whatever the international market says its worth.

Specialty coffee roasters, of course, don't just place multi-ton orders by e-mail. They demand samples from importers, sometimes sending their own employees into the field to track down processors and millers willing to meet their standards in exchange for a premium price.

Trouble is, the same growers who produce the best coffee also produce a lot of less distinguished beans. Nobody's out shopping for those beans; they have to be sold at the open-market price. Thanks to Vietnam's entry to the world market, there's a huge surplus of cheap, low-grade beans out there, taking Latin American and African bean prices down with them. Thousands of coffee farmers and laborers have lost their land and jobs as a consequence, which in turn has led to a rise in illegal emigration and increased drug trade.