The Economic Importance of Coffee

The economic importance of Coffee

Coffee is one of the world’s most popular beverages. Also, it is important to the global economy. Follows after the oil, coffee is “the second most traded commodity in the earth” (“15 things”, n.d.). According to the Wikipedia, There are over 2.25 billion cups of coffee are sold in the world every day. The consumption happens mainly in the industrialized countries, such as the USA, Canada and Europe, but over 90% of coffee is produced in developing countries, such as Brazil, Vietnam and Colombia (“Economics”, 2012). As the figure1 shows below, this map indicates coffee imports by country. In 2005, the USA imported over 1200 thousands of tones coffee, the greatest amount as compared with one another in the map. And there was a research shows that, “in the year 2000 in the US, coffee consumption was 22.1 gallons (100.468 liters) per capita, more than 150 million Americans (18 and older) drink coffee on a daily basis, with 65 percent of coffee drinkers consuming their hot beverage in the morning” (“Economics”, 2012, ¶5). Canada, Europe, Russia and Australia also import large amount of coffee every year.

The reason for those countries which import coffee a lot every year is coffee tree does not grow up in those countries, but the people there like coffee and cannot live without coffee. Therefore, the coffee companies import larger amount of coffee from developing countries and make big profit every year.

Worldwide, because the coffee trees just grow up in the “bean belt “which is the area between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn (see figure 4) and the top ten green coffee producers (see Table 1) are developing countries (“15 things”, n.d.), “25 million small producers rely on coffee for a living” (“Economics”, 2012, ¶2). For example, in Brazil, where almost produces a third of the entire world's coffee, over 5 million people work in the