July 12, 2024

Production of the robusta variety (the stuff in cheap American coffee) has suffered in Vietnam and Indonesia because of drought. Production is down 5% and shipments fell 11.3% year over year nine months to September.

• Roaster prices are $1,000 above futures prices.
• Resulting in 60% rise in those futures prices to $4,667 per ton.

For the last three months of the season, exports may be around a combined 150,000 tons, according to the survey. That would be less than half of what Vietnam has exported for the period in the last five years. (BN)

However, Arabica varieties (the good stuff) are also down because Brazil has faced bad growing weather too. The futures markets for arabica are at a two-year high.

Add to this the shipping price increases across the board, a bad dollar exchange price for USD, the shift in the EU's deforestation policies, and the result is a very large expected price increase for coffee on the horizon.

Lavazza has stated that all this will impact both their prices and profits into 2025.

This is similar to the story we discussed earlier in the year regarding chocolate, which saw a large price spike caused by both bad weather and an uptick of speculation on the futures market.

The issue for workers and farmers is that the price increases are not captured because the financialized contract system does not allow increases to be paid to the farmer for their cacao crop.

This is less the case for coffee in Latin America, thanks to decades of activist reorganization of coffee farmers into cooperatives. However, "fair trade" and the cooperative roasters model are still at the whim of monopoly coffee distributors.

All in all, expect higher prices for your morning brew and your evening desert, as poorer farmers consider leaving the industry.

This is a microcosm of the larger food production system. While some crops are doing well (soybeans), more are negatively impacted by the weather changes caused by global heating. Wheat is a major one; production is down across the USA and Europe. In China, all the major food staples are threatened this year because of droughts and floods.

Heat waves are also creating bad situations for growing.

more than 5,000 people were evacuated and rice fields were saturated following a dike breach in Hunan province late on Friday. Authorities have issued flooding alerts in Shandong and Sichuan for this week, and warned that several major waterways - including the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers - are at risk of overflowing. (BN)

Headline inflation was also down, mostly due to rental prices in New York moderating after last month's huge rise, airline fares actually declining, transport costs declining, and US core goods CPI in negative territory (because of growth in the number of cheaper imports).

AT&T says criminals stole phone records of ‘nearly all’ customers in new data breach

The data breach was linked to AT&T allowing other companies to analyze their customer data. The data that was leaked was from these companies storing information about you to build advertising profiles so they can sell you more stuff.

Private customer data floats around in massive datasets, allowing ad companies, political parties, and fascist governments to manipulate people on issues ranging from buying soap to determining what content you see on social media, to voting preference.

All things we do not need or want, but there is just so much money to be made on selling that data that companies and regulators don't care.

Many of these breaches are actually related to third-party companies with which they are sharing your data. For example, Snowflake offered large data services to companies without the in-house capacity to do these kinds of analysis (because they can outsource it to Snowflake-like companies). The data then accumulates in even larger monopoly pools. Companies like Snowflake are run by sociopathic Tech Bros who receive money from other sociopaths (in hedge funds) in order to defraud the world.

Such is the great system we have set up.