Difficult Times for Coffee Industry as Demand Falls

The international market for coffee is not good for the world's millions of coffee farmers. Facing prices at a 30-year low and production increases that outstrip demand, hundreds of thousands of coffee farm workers in Central America and Brazil are being forced off the land or into production of more profitable, yet harmful, coca production. Some former farmers are moving north to find work in the United States and Mexico, although legal and profitable work is not necessarily to be found there, either. Some US coffeehouse chains and at least one of the four multinationals that dominate the global coffee industry have introduced 'fair-trade' coffees to help boost incomes of coffee farmers and stave off the economic and social ills brought on by overproduction. But even these efforts, says this article in the New York Times, aren't certain to bring about change in time to alleviate the woes of the world's coffee growers. – YaleGlobal