We can argue all day and all night over whether the massive poultry cull was necessary or not but two things are 100% certain. The first is that fewer birds producing fewer eggs gave us yet another massive spike in the price of eggs, typically an affordable and easy-to-prepare protein depended upon by jillions of people. The second is that I just learned of something worse.
Actually, let's talk about that bird cull for just a moment. I did a little research on that a couple of weeks ago, thinking I might get a column out of it. I gave up on the column because half the reports I read indicated that the bird flu test is subject to false positives and that massive numbers of egg hens were unnecessarily slaughtered. The other half indicated no such problem. So I threw up my hands and abandoned the column.
But on reflection, since the cull was an act of the Biden administration, and since everything they did was either wrongheaded, spiteful, or both, I'm going to ignore half my research and just tell you that it was the wrong call. "I was going to buy eggs but then escrow fell through" is the fault of the Biden administration and it didn't have to be that way.
I feel better now. But we're both about to feel worse — if, like me, you have a minimum two-cup-a-day coffee habit.
As consumers, we've been lucky so far. Coffee, I learned today, is the second-most traded commodity after oil. If you want to know what the planet really runs on, it's two very different kinds of black liquid, both packed full of energy. What it means for coffee drinkers is that the source and price of the cup you're sipping right now were locked in months ago. What it also means is that as those futures expire and traders lock the new ones in, higher prices get locked in, too. Maybe much higher. Maybe double.
It's already happening.
And Another Thing: Doing my research for this column, I immediately closed any tabs that referenced "climate change." Out of the dozen or so stories I opened, that left maybe three. And then two of those turned out to have climate change references that I'd missed on the first pass. Some days, you just can't win.
Last month, "Arabica coffee prices hit an eye-watering new high on the Intercontinental Exchange at $3.48 a pound," Food and Wine reported. "This means the price is up more than 40% over the last three months and 79% year-over-year — and it's set to trickle down to the consumer level soon."
This month, things are worse. "The world benchmark for the global price of Arabica coffee has more than doubled what it was a year ago, as of Friday," KIRO 7 News reported Monday.
The biggest culprit is drought, which hit coffee producers Brazil and Vietnam particularly hard. "Brazil, which exports the lion's share of the industry's preferred arabica beans, was beginning its growing season as the country's worst drought on record stretched into a second year," Meg Duff wrote today for Business Insider.
"Two decades ago, US Department of Agriculture economists looked at how commodity coffee price swings affected grocery shelves," Duff continued. "They found that every $0.10 increase in futures led to an immediate $0.02 increase in prices for canisters of ground coffee. When commodity prices stayed high, the rest of the increase was passed on over the course of a year."
And, yes, there's also nervousness on the producer side about President Donald Trump imposing tariffs on Colombia, another yuge coffee producer. But the tariff threat was quickly resolved between Trump and Colombian President Gustavo Petro.
The price of coffee, on the other hand, is going nowhere but up — and those higher prices look like they're here to stay for a while.
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