During the pandemic I've hopped around between different creative pursuits cause I'm a noncommittal dweeb. One thing I tried my hand at was making youtube videos, and while researching coffee production I was surprised by just how fucked it really is. Everyone knows that coffee is produced with slavery, but the global economy's relationship with coffee is terrifying. People are not addicted to coffee, society is. In fact, coffee shops are the fastest growing part of the restaurant business. The West is so addicted to coffee that it is the second most in-demand commodity behind only crude oil. It is also (disputed) the second most popular drink in the world behind water, though this fluctuates with soft drinks and tea. We produce so much fucking coffee. Here are some numbers. All data is from 2020.
3 key figures: 1 coffee bean is ~.1325g, 1 cup of coffee is 10g of beans, 1 bag of coffee (unit of measure for international production) is 60kg.
Consumption: In 2020 the world produced 168.5 million bags of coffee, weighing 10,110,000 metric tons of fresh beans. That's the same as:
MASS
- Blue Whales: Average mass is 110 metric tons= 91,909 Blue Whales (Second level of abstraction that's not as helpful as it is funny: Average whale length is 27m x 91,909 = 2,481.5km Burj Khalifa is .8298km at the tip x 91,909 = 2,990.5 Burj Khalifa’s American football field: .9144km x 91,909 = 2,713.8 football fields)
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Heaviest recorded Elephant: Mass of 1.22 tons 8,286,885.25 Fat Fucking Elephants
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Nimitz class aircraft carrier: Mass of 100,000 tons 101.1 Aircraft carriers
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Great Pyramid of Giza: Estimated 5.3 million metric tons 1.91 Great Pyramids
VOLUME
- Coffee Beans: Density of beans: 561kg/m^3 10,110,000,000kg/(561kg/m3)=18,021,390.37m3=18,021.39km^3 of beans produced in 2020
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Great Pyramid 18,021.39km3/2,583.283km3=~7 Great Pyramids
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Lake Tanganyika (3rd largest lake on earth by volume) 18,900 km3/18,021.39km^3=about the same.
What horrifies me is the shear number of beans that slaves had to pick by hand. 60kg per bag/.1325g (mass of 1 bean) x 168.5 mil bags = 76,301,886,792,452.83 beans
Thank you NeverGoOutside for pointing out that I used the total population of the US and EU. I did the math again using the 15-64 demographics because they're the biggest coffee drinkers and it's a pain in the ass to factor in the elderly. Here's the revised population data:
EU:
Coffee drinking population (15-64): 286.62 million
Imported bags: 49 million
49,000,000*6000=294,000,000,000 cups
294,000,000,000 cups/ 286,620,000 drinkers= 1025.75 per year or 2.8 cups per day
USA:
Coffee drinking population (15-64): 218.8 million
Imported bags: 26 million
26,000,000*6000=156,000,000,000/218.8 million = 713 (rounded from 712.98) cups per year or 2 cups per day (rounded from 1.95)
In short, I'm sick of doing math, stop buying coffee. I'm probably gonna do chocolate next week.
I hope I didn't fuck up the formatting of this post. Edit: I fucked up the formatting
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I’m sure this has been plugged many times before on this website, but obligatory link to Zapatista co-op coffee: https://schoolsforchiapas.org/store/coffee-corn-and-agricultural/zapatista-coffee/
I hesitate to ask this because I feel like I know the answer, but is fairtrade certified actually really better or is it some bullshit they slap on so people can feel better while the same horrible shit happens but the farmer gets five cents more?
It's one of the few products I can consistently buy fairtrade (even at the supermarket) and it's not much more expensive than the other stuff which makes me suspicious
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Fair trade products and the NGO's that govern them are a very dubious business. Especially with coffee, the NGO's that sell fair trade coffee go into communities often pay producers about the same as what they were getting before, pocketing most of the difference in price for themselves. Also, when NGO's start fair trade operations, companies that sell fuel and fertilizer typically up their own prices, leaving the farmers with the same pay they had before or less. This is not a universal principle, but it happens far more frequently than it should and is very difficult to document because the organizations that are supposed to regulate these things are themselves NGO's who can receive substantial amounts of funding from the fair trade companies themselves and local governments who don't want the nature of their practices revealed.
"Direct trade" is what I've heard, or look into the business to see if they are more specific about what they call "fair trade". Where the roasters go directly to the farmers for their coffee and pay a reasonable price.
An example I know of is Equal Exchange who work with democratically organized farmers and trade directly. Their US based roasting and distribution also operates as a worker-owned co-op.
The sheer amount of coffee we produce is already unsustainable. There is no source to which everyone could switch that would be sustainable without everyone drinking less coffee and coffee becoming substantially more expensive. Our system now does not even meet the full demand for coffee. On an individual level yes, one person getting ethically sourced coffee is better morally for them, but it's not possible for everyone to do that. The more we switch to sustainable methods the more expensive coffee becomes by virtue of having to pay people way more, making coffee a product reserved for the upper class.
The same is true of basically everything in the context of climate change and sustainability, as an aside: we have to consume less, not differently.
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