[LINK] "Hot, Caffeinated, and Expanding: The Global Geography of Coffee, Tea, and Yerba Mate"

[rfmcdonald]

Geocurrents' Martin Lewis has a fantastic post outlining the global trade coffee (tea an yerba mate, too).

It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the global trade in coffee and tea. Among commodities, the $80+ billion international coffee market is sometimes said to trail only that of oil. Coffee is an essential source of revenue for many countries, with Burundi making more than half of its export earnings from the crop, even though it does not count among the world’s top twenty producers. By weight and value, the international coffee trade surpasses that of tea, but tea is still the more widely consumed beverage. According to the Wikipedia, “Tea is the most popular manufactured drink in the world in terms of consumption. Its consumption equals all other manufactured drinks in the world – including coffee, chocolate, soft drinks, and alcohol – put together.”

Economic historians emphasize the crucial roles played by coffee and tea. The early modern European and American tea trade with China was large enough to be of political as well as economic significance, as reflected to this day in “tea party” slogans. Seventeenth century coffee houses in London and Amsterdam were not merely drink dispensers, but also incubators of the stock market and the insurance industry; the original Lloyd’s of London was a coffee house. As historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch relates in his engaging Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, the “sober drink” of coffee was widely linked to Protestant rectitude and frugal business habits. Although both coffee and tea are still frowned upon by many and prohibited by a few groups, both drinks seem to have generally healthful effects. Recent studies led Seeking Alpha to half-jestingly refer to “coffee stocks as a healthcare investment.” In historical terms, the main benefits of such beverages probably stemmed from the fact that they demanded the boiling of water, reducing microbial contamination.

[. . .]

The disparity between coffee growing and coffee drinking countries appears less pronounced on a map of per capita consumption. Here the main patterns pertain to world regions: coffee use is high through most of the Americas and especially in Europe (with a few notable exceptions), low in sub-Saharan Africa and throughout mainland South, East, and Southeast Asia, and highly variable in the greater Middle East. Within the coffee-drinking zone, Nordic countries stand out, with Finland’s 12+ kilograms per person per year almost meriting a category of its own. It is true that many coffee-exporting countries are not particularly keen on the drink, although Brazil, which alone produces a third of all internationally traded coffee, imbibes fairly heavily; Brazilians drink more coffee, on average, than residents of the United States. Several others important producers, such as Colombia, Venezuela, and Ethiopia, exhibit moderate levels of consumption, whereas low levels of coffee drinking characterize such major exporters as Vietnam, Indonesia, and Peru.

The geography of coffee has changed greatly since the early modern era. Several places that were once redolent of coffee now drink little. Yemen was world’s first major coffee exporter, with one of its ports, Mocha, giving its name to a particular coffee preparation. Today qat-obsessed Yemen has little use for the drink. Indonesia is still a major exporter, but consumption remains low even on the island of Java, which has lent its name to the beverage more generally. ‘Turkish coffee” is famous, as once were the coffee houses of Istanbul, but Turkey today consumes little of the black beverage, much preferring tea. Ethiopia, coffee’s homeland, does both export and imbibe substantial quantities, but trouble lurks; according to a recent report, “Ethiopia’s coffee export continues to plummet due to chaotic government controls and enforcement of bad policies.”

Coffee consumption is generally quite low in Asia, with South Korea and especially Japan forming exceptions. But coffee producers are excited by prospects for growth in the Asian market, particularly that of China. Although the average Chinese person drinks only 5 cups a year, the figure in Shanghai is now over 20, and consumption is growing quickly as Starbucks and other chains proliferate. The biggest growth in the coffee market, however, has occurred in the Gulf States; according to a recent report, “The UAE has been the fastest growing market by volume for coffee in the world with coffee volume sales expected to register an 80 per cent growth from 2009-2014, or a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 12 per cent year on year over the same period.”

On the production side of the coffee ledger, the biggest change over the past two decades has been the rise of Vietnam, now the second largest producer by a healthy margin. The rise of Vietnamese coffee has often been described as economically destabilizing, generating distress in several poor, coffee-dependent countries. As can be seen on the Wikipedia map below, Vietnam competes in the robusta coffee market, which is otherwise heavily concentrated in Africa.

Lewis also comes up with interesting patterns in the distribution of tea drinking and growing (broadly paralleling coffee) and in yerba mate, apparently starting to take off beyond southern South America in the United States as well as the Middle East (ties of migration with Syria and Lebanon are key, here).

Go, read and see the maps!