The coffee is around partially because the supply grew to meet the surge in interest in "quality" beans. At least that is my thinking. With Starbucks and other premium coffee brands becoming the rage over the last few years, I think farmers overreacted. Part of the problem is that I don't think total demand for coffee changed all that much, it just followed population and economic growth trends mostly. People didn't necessarily drink more coffee, they just switched into more premium stuff. Premium stuff meant people were willing to pay more, but it meant more quality beans. Problem is that quality beans isn't something you just plant specifically. What it created was the demand from farmers to produce more and more beans in hopes of getting quality and also I would guess that the presence of more money in the market might have also falsely signalled more overall demand. So the farmers, spurred on by their governments, thought bean farming was in a renaissance and they produced into glut. The glut has finally forced the farmers into doing what they should have done in the first place and that is to destroy the least quality of their crop so as to yield close to the same total crop, just better stuff that is demanded by the market. Hard though to tell a farmer or anyone that its in his best interest to destroy his crop because the market will do better. That is telling him to sacrifice some smaller amount of money so some other guy who happened to make the best quality stuff can make even more. The only way its accomplished is as the "cartel" of sorts is doing, buying coffee on a national basis from everyone and then destroying what isn't quality. I forget the economic law at work here, but its something that clearly came because the marketplace was misinformed. They read the signals wrong. They are starting to get the supply right though, but only after years of suffering. As the world economy improves, consumption will increase. Further it could be a very powerful increase. Lower-income countries are starting to get a taste for coffee these days. China used to never consume coffee, now they are slowly catching onto it. Latin American countries always thought coffee was something along the lines of Nescafe, but they are coming more into a Starbucks-type crowd too, at least those that can afford it. Coffee will make a strong long-term surge in the near future, its just that this is a commodity that almost everyone trades on too short a time horizon to really take advantage of it. Once again it will be dictated more by the rational actions of the marketplace suppliers...that damn economics thing again!