The Early Phases and Globalization of Coffee

A commodity is a raw material or primary agricultural product that can be bought and sold. The market treats it as equipment or nearly so with no regard to who produced it. The original producer does not make the “big” money from the good that has become a commodity demanded by consumers. A commodity’s supply and demand is part of one universal market like corn, or wheat. A stereo is something that would not be considered a commodity. Other things are important about a stereo not that it is just a stereo but what brand and quality is in consideration when purchasing a stereo. Demand for one type might be much larger than the demand for another. This is not the case with commodities; they lose differentiation across their supply base. An example of this is grain; after it was first produced it lost its value, essentially, beyond a monetary value. In the beginning farmers produced the essentials for their families like grain, livestock, and produce. As resources to make these things decreased, like limber, they had to start depending on others for help. Farmers turned to storekeepers to hold their grain in return for the resources to continue farming. The storekeepers became a type of “middlemen” trading value for value when it came to selling the grain. They began to ship the grain out away from the site that it originated. The grain was placed into sacks and shipped on water, each sack being individual to types of grain and the farmer’s of the grain. No type of grain was mixed with another. The different farmer’s grain was traded for its true value. After a while, new people came in that had to resources and ability to store the grain for long periods of time. This is where the mixing of grains began to happen, these people un-s...

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...r coffee that originated there as ‘Café de Columbia’ and other countries followed them doing this as well. By the 1960’s most countries producing coffee had their own regulations for quality.

Works Cited

Cronon, William. "Chapter 3 Pricing the Future: Grain." Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991. N. pag. Print.

Daviron, Benoît, and Stefano Ponte. The Coffee Paradox: Global Markets, Commodity Trade, and the Elusive Promise of Development. London: Zed in Association with the CTA, 2005. Print.

The Struggle for Control of a Commodity Chain: Instant Coffee from Latin America

John M. Talbot Latin American Research Review , Vol. 32, No. 2 (1997) , pp. 117-135

Published by: The Latin American Studies Association Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2503869