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The world is facing a coffee deficit
- cletus 6y agoSo cue the US telling developing countries "hey you can grow coffee instead of coca/opium and make a good living", a large number of farmers growing coffee, the supply gets flooded, prices drop and the farmers switch back to the coca/opium harvests that no doubt made them much more money anyway. The circle of life.
- jeffbee 6y agoI would have thought that artificial opioids like fentanyl would have wrecked the poppy market already.
- tehjoker 6y agoI recall reading it's several orders of magnitude more potent and its typical use is elephant tranquilizer. Far higher potency means it's easy for a small mistake in measurement to result in a really high dose. I would imagine that seems risky even to people accustomed to heroin.
- jeffreyrogers 6y agoI don't think heroin users get a choice. My understanding is a lot of the street supply is already cut with fentanyl.
- Applejinx 6y agoRecovering addict here, couple decades clean: yes, that's been true for years. If you are in touch with the using-addict population, for instance you're in recovery and participate in meetings, you'd be certain of this. It's weird when maybe a double-digit percentage of the people you know, wind up dead (and this is before covid). When you include people you know, upset because people THEY know have overdosed and died, then yeah: the effects of fentanyl are pretty damn apparent. People will not be addicts cautiously. Even if they think that's what they're being, they're mistaken.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- moistly 6y ago> its typical use is elephant tranquilizer Which leads me to ask: how many flippin’ elephants are being tranquilized, that we need so much of this stuff being manufactured?! Poor creatures.
- perl4ever 6y agoWith terminal cancer, the progression I've seen is first oxycontin pills, then fentanyl patches, and then liquid morphine.
- mikestew 6y agoAccording to TFA, sourcing coffee isn’t the problem. It was in the first paragraph in case you missed it on your first reading.
- throwaway823882 6y agoDoesn't matter. If they can't export/ship/sell it, then they don't make money, so they go back to growing drugs.
- wobbly_bush 6y ago> Marex Spectron this month increased its estimate for a global coffee deficit to 10.7 million bags in 2021-22, compared with its previous projection of 8 million bags, citing lower Brazilian arabica output after adverse weather damaged crops. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said in a report that if production in Central America doesn’t improve in coming years, the market will enter a structural deficit given the rebound in demand
- bregma 6y agoThere's a shortage of shipping containers for the cocaine and opium, too.
- p1necone 6y agoHow often are those shipped in containers as opposed to DIY submarines?
- angry_octet 6y agoOh all the time. But global freight is so huge, only a tiny portion can be checked. It has to make its way to a shipping source before it can enter the legitimate supply chain though. Although 3D x-rays are used extensively for scanning freight, it it still easy to smuggle high value product.
- Kluny 6y agoOh no
- throwaway5752 6y agoFor those that can't be bothered to read beyond the headline. "global shortage of shipping containers that’s upended the food trade." Shipping container shortage.
- curmudgeon22 6y agoPlus crop problems in Brazil: Arabica-coffee futures in New York have risen about 24% since the end of October following the damage to Brazilian groves.
- derefr 6y agoThis confuses me, as shipping containers seem... really easy to produce. They're not CPUs; you don't need a special fab. They're corrugated boxes made of welded cold-rolled steel. Pretty much every country — every industry in every country! — should be able to scrape together the natural resources to make their own shipping containers. There should never be a shortage of supply of shipping containers, any more than there could have been a shortage in supply of, say, the hemp sacks used in bulk shipping in the 1700s. You need one? You make one! From the article: > Denmark’s A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S, the world’s largest shipping company, said containers and charter vessels are temporarily unavailable for purchase or lease I have a feeling it's more about the ships. Shipbuilding is a pretty CapEx-intensive pursuit. Container production, not so much.
- mrguyorama 6y agoIt could be the same reason why toilet paper struggled so much. Sure it's super easy to produce, but do you want to be on the hook for whatever you spent ramping up production when the shortage disappears between 1 month and 1 year from now?
- post_break 6y agoThat feeling is the same thing with railcar shortages. They are super easy to produce. But no one wants to be stuck with them if there is a glut, only a few manufacturers of railcars and they don't scale like servers. They make a normal amount of railcars, and when they need more they can make what 10-20% more? And then since they are "easy" to produce they still might take weeks to months to finish because of parts they rely on all being strained as well.
- jgalt212 6y agotoo much cash, not enough stuff. inflation is coming.
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoUh no people dont doubke their coffee consumption because they have more money
- neckardt 6y agoBut if people have more money, wouldn't that mean producers could raise their prices and people would still be willing to pay it?
- gruez 6y agoOnly if they coordinate and act like a cartel. Otherwise it's a prisoner's dilemma situation where the party that doesn't raise prices gains market share.
- xoa 6y agoNo coordination needed in a supply limited scenario with sufficiently inelastic demand. That's not a prisoner's dilemma. In that case every single bag has multiple potential interested buyers, which means each supplier can individually have buyers bid against each other and see the sale price go up. Organization of course might let them do even better, but it's not necessary. There is no market share to be gained from the supplier point of view (though as the article says, those higher up the chain may have different motives and margins) because supply just can't be ramped up instantly with a good like coffee. It doesn't matter if a farmer would in principle like to have 10x as much to sell, they have what they grew, and could only respond to demand by increasing supply slowly (and there is the risk of overshoot). If they don't raise prices they're just leaving money on the table, since every bag will get bought.
- nostrademons 6y agoThat's where the supply shortage comes in. If lots of people have money but there's excess capacity in the market, nobody will raise prices because the firm that doesn't ramps up capacity and captures the excess market share. If lots of people have money but there's a supply shortage, the firm that refuses to raise prices lacks the excess capacity to capitalize on their consumer demand, and fails to gain market share.
- baxtr 6y agoTo give some hope to some of you: I stopped drinking coffee back in December. I was a heavy drinker before. I stopped because my stomach wouldn’t stop being upset permanently, and I had a sore throat all the time. And no, I didn’t drink cheap shit coffee, quite the opposite. It all vanished after I stopped drinking coffee. The first day was brutal, the second a bit better. A week later, I was fine. Now I drink green tea all day and feel quite good from a stomach perspective. And, I truly hope green tea is not transported on the same ships as coffee!
- ianai 6y agoMatcha. Smooth constant rush of caffeine and theanine as your body digests the powder. Pu-erh is another favorite though.
- cyberpunk 6y agoPh-erg really is the path of righteousness; it’s not for everyone though and there is such minutia involved in this type of tea that it’s very easy to get a bit.. obsessive.. I mean, it’s normal to have separate yixing teapots depending on the age of your sheng right? ;)
- theragra 6y agoHeretic! You need separate teapot for each variety of sheng.
- cyberpunk 6y agoWhat do you think of younger sheng? I’ve had a few from Mei leaf that have been fantastic (tub highness especially) — but generally I find it difficult to find decently aged stuff..
- theragra 6y agoI am not fan of sheng, honestly. So, I only drink truly aged stuff. It happens not so often, because it is pricey, but I don't want to pay :)
- BrandoElFollito 6y agoThe graphs are horrible. By showing changes between 5.5 and 7.5M you have a rollercoaster. When you show the same graph between 0 and 7.5M, it gets flatter and the huge changes maybe do not mean that much. This would get a 10/20 mark at my lecture.
- baron_harkonnen 6y agoBy the same logic we should print charts of heart rates and body temperature from starting from 0. Regional temperature over time plots should always start from 0 kelvin, Google's stock price should displayed from 0 to 3000, etc. I don't know about you but I would be annoyed if my smart watch app displayed BPM starting at 0 making my changing heart rate an ignoreable fuzz. The idea that "charts should start at 0" is an absurd dogma that is immediately recognizable as such by anyone that has ever worked with data visualization to make decisions. A better guideline is to display a reasonable range that lets you see historically what has been possible with a bit of buffer. For relatively Guassian changes a few standard deviations is good. In general your limits should not be outside of the bounds of what is reasonably possible. Coffee trade is not going to 0 anytime soon, and suggesting that visually is dishonest.
- BrandoElFollito 6y ago> By the same logic we should print charts of heart rates and body temperature from starting from 0 No. We do not want to prove anything here. The trend can be only within a range so that range should be used. > Regional temperature over time plots should always start from 0 kelvin If you discuss how wide the changes are - yes. But thi si not what you are looking at - you are looking at temperatures between -50C and +50C (taking the extremes) and this is also the reason why thermometers are scaled like that. > The idea that "charts should start at 0" is an absurd dogma that is immediately recognizable as such by anyone that has ever worked with data visualization to make decisions. Certainly. I believe that physicists and engineers who did actual research on actual data can be dismissed. > A better guideline is to display a reasonable range that lets you see historically what has been possible with a bit of buffer. It depends on what you want to show. If you want to show relative changes then plot relative changes. If you want to discuss absolute changes (which in the article do not make any sense) then you have to address the whole range. We are talking about millions of something, and that something can drop to zero. > For relatively Gaussian changes a few standard deviations is good. On what basis do you assume that you have a gaussian distribution? (I assume - of changes, form your comment) > In general your limits should not be outside of the bounds of what is reasonably possible A data scientist making a real analysis will look at what is reasonably possible, but possible full stop. This sets the ranges of observation. To take your first example, the only possible temperatures when dealing with a live body in ambient temperature is from, say, 17C to about 44C. Thi is the range that should be used when discussing "wild changes in temperature. And not a graph that goes from 36.5 to 37 and showing valleys and mountains and drawing conclusions from there. > Coffee trade is not going to 0 anytime soon, and suggesting that visually is dishonest What is visually dishonest is to show absolute changes and make any kind of comments on how important they are by not taking the possible values, especially when talking about values going down.
- wobbly_bush 6y ago>In the facilities of Dinamo, one of Brazil’s largest coffee warehouses operators, there’s a lot of product stuck waiting for containers Can anyone comment on the cost difference to ship something from Brazil to US in containers vs as air cargo? Also, isn't shipping via trucks or trains an option?
- circumvent123 6y agoThe Darien gap might be an issue there.
- Anarch157a 6y agoBrazilian here. Most of the coffee production is in the south and south-east (São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Paraná). To get the coffee in bulk to where it can cross the gap, it has to travel thru shitty roads that have more craters than the far side of the Moon and some that aren't paved at all. Then it gets to the Amazonas river. It's so wide, some Portuguese navigator tought it was a fresh water Sea. There's only one bridge conencting the city os Manaus in the north bank to south and sone ferries scattered all over. Then you have to cross half the Amazon jungle to get to a port in Colombia (Venezuela is not an option for obvious reasons). Tl;dr, the Darian Gap is the least of your problems if you want to move coffee by land from here to the US.
- cesarb 6y agoAlso Brazilian here, wouldn't an alternative path be to go even further southwest, leave the country, and only then move north more or less following the Pacific coast? That would both avoid all these shitty roads and remove the need to cross the Amazonas.
- oetnxkdrlgcexu 6y agoLooking at google maps, it sort of looks like it goes from the jungle to the Andes to the Atacama dessert. I'm genuinely surprised at how impassible this all seems. especially the Andes.
- IG_Semmelweiss 6y agoCoffee is not very different than other commodities. Much of it is in trouble at the moment. Supply chains continue to be disrupted due to myriad of reasons. Its not only missing containers, you can argue they are still somewhat misplaces but its not just that - changing rules (COVID), changing borders (UK) , unstable financing (try to get money from any factor or revolver that is not a bank, good luck now), changing market tastes , changes even related to humans (unemployed disruptions along the supply chain workflow). There has been many unsung heroes from the pandemic but at least as far as USA is concerned, I am still amazed we can still buy stuff from amazon with 2 day delivery. (To wit - amazon also is not helping by limiting FBA inbound capacity to sellers) Spot prices are all over the place. It will be like this for a while.
- dv_dt 6y agoAlso I think climate change will be a increasing player in events with global disruptions in food, commodities, and industrial goods. Global capitalism has relentlessly optimized for lowest cost, but with minimal to no margin for risks or resiliency.
- Retric 6y agoHaving a vast surplus is a very useful form of resiliency. For commodities surplus is equivalent to low prices.
- dv_dt 6y agoHow so? Low prices drive alternate suppliers out of business as well as cutting margin for players in the market from having buffers to deal with mitigations possibly needing capital cost investments to keep bringing commodities to market. e.g. if you have a temporary drought, does the farmer have enough profit such that they have savings or capital lines to buy temporary water supply to get your crop through the dry period, or money to access getting your customs setup for new markets that have had a shortage in the regular markets. Or access to buy or rent new containers in this case possibly.
- cgb223 6y agoI wish the article would actually go into _what_ is causing the container shortage Are they not manufacturing them? Prioritizing them elsewhere? Is it political? Anyone know what’s going on?
- ogre_codes 6y agoWell for starters, there are lines of cargo ships outside of LA, 20-30 off the coast of LA right now. Typically it would be 1-2. That’s something like 100,000 sitting idle right there. Then many of the storage facilities are also jam packed with containers too. Apparently we’ve all gone on a spending spree during COVID so more containers are simply out there filled with crap we’ve ordered and waiting for shipment, unloading, and return to the ports.
- makomk 6y agoFor a start, a whole bunch of containers ended up stuck in locations where they wouldn't normally be and there's not enough return goods, and for some reason shipping companies aren't interested in carrying empty containers back on their return trips?
- elorant 6y agoThere's no shortage of containers per se. The problem is more complex because due to the pandemic the whole logistics line isn't functioning the way it used to. Ports are understaffed because of lockdowns, factories close down so the goods at ports can't get delivered to manufacturing, shipping carriers reduce the number of vessels at sea to avoid a drop in ocean rates so there are ships sitting at ports and no one around to move the containers where they're needed, and so on and so forth.
- Johnny555 6y agoThere's another Hackernews discussion about just that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26574077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26574077
- poletopole 6y agoAm I the only “lucky apple user” where I was randomly redirected to a cheezy malware site from 20 years ago?
- mint2 6y agoNope, I also got some sort of browser hijacking redirect from their ad network. It’s been a while since I’ve seen those.
- artemonster 6y agoIs this something in your phone, or its an ad on the website?
- mint2 6y agoThis website’s ad network is delivering browser hijacking ads. I haven’t seen one of those for a long time.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- luthfur 6y agoI have been wondering what's the root cause of this sudden container shortage. Found this blog post with an explanation: https://www.hillebrand.com/media/publication/where-are-all-the-containers-the-global-shortage-explained https://www.hillebrand.com/media/publication/where-are-all-t...
- agentultra 6y agoI've been looking for a decent alternative for years as I expect the climate crisis will basically decimate our ability to yield crops by the end of this decade or the middle of the next. Any suggestions out there?
- interlocutor2 6y agoIf you're that concerned, what's your plan for the rest of your food?
- agentultra 6y agoI changed my diet years ago to be mostly vegan (occasional eggs/cheese/honey). We buy local as much as possible, during the growing season we try to buy direct from local farmers and supplement with our own perma-culture garden in growing season and share with local community gardens. I really enjoy coffee, as much as the next programmer, but if there's an alternative I'd be down.
- bamboozled 6y agoI think it would be fair to say we’re facing a deficit in everything ? Food, water, safe places to live?
- 29athrowaway 6y agoIf I lost access to coffee I can still have tea, guarana or yerba mate.
- rsj_hn 6y agohmm * "highest shipping costs since 2019" * "lowest inventory since 2016" * Record harvest in Brazil It doesn't seem like a big crisis. I smell sensationalism.
- bps4484 6y agoI was thinking the exact same thing. Does everyone else remember The Great Coffee Shortage of 2016? Because I don't. This smells like a PR story funded by commodities traders that are long on coffee. Better stock up now!!!!!!!!!
- solidsnack9000 6y agoHahaha, maybe they got me. I bought a ton of vacuum sealed coffee in different formats -- even Ogawa's camp packets -- after reading this article.
- RHSman2 6y agoI’m sorry. I really like coffee.
- rawoke083600 6y agoThis is how the end looks...
- intricatedetail 6y agoThis would be tough. Out of many things caffeine seems to be hardest to quit. I quit alcohol, smoking but coffee seems impossible.