A comment on our  post, Happy National Coffee Day – Coffee, Edward Lloyd, Ships and Shipping, by Barista Uno host of the excellent Marine Cafe blog raised two interesting points.  He commented:

There ought to be an International Coffee Day. Coffee, after all, is the second most traded and shipped commodity in the world. One day of the year to pay tribute to the great coffeehouses of the past and present, the coffee farmers and the ship operators and seafarers who transport the produce. Wouldn’t that be nice?

I agree whole heartedly with Barista Uno.   After a bit of research it appears that National Coffee on August 29th is also celebrated as International Coffee Day.  Who established these “days” is still a mystery to me.  As far as I am concerned every day is coffee day.

The second point – that coffee is the “second most traded and shipped commodity in the world,” is intriguing. This is a widely quoted and generally accepted “fact” cited by virtually everyone from the International Coffee Organization to Starbucks to the Public Broadcasting System.  Where did this “fact” come from?

One of the influential sources to popularize this assertion  was Mark Pendergrast’s “Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed the World.”  It was first published in 1999 and is often referred to as the “Bible of Coffee.”   But where did Pendergrast source this “fact?”   It turns out, even he didn’t know.

Coffee second only to oil? Is coffee really the second largest commodity? Mark Pendergrast investigates and finds some startling

In the introduction to Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World (Basic Books, 1999), I wrote: “Coffee is the second most valuable exported legal commodity on earth (after oil).” Although I pride myself on my scholarship, I did not bother providing a citation for this assertion. I just knew it was true, since so many people I had interviewed kept repeating it, and I had read it in other books and articles. But guess what? I think I was wrong, and so is everyone else who keeps repeating this myth.

It appears that the correct citation may be that coffee is the second most valuable commodity exported by developing countries.   Nevertheless, the larger point remains the same – coffee plays a huge role in the world economy.

As Mark Pendergrast writes:

“I do not know how this legend began, but it has been around at least since the early 1970s. This on-going apparent misstatement of fact reminds me of that line from the classic John Ford Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance–‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.'”

Jose Dauster Sette of the ICO observed that it really doesn’t matter whether coffee is second or 50th in world rank. “Whatever the relative ranking of coffee in the international trade of commodities,” he emailed, “we believe it is more relevant to emphasize the important social role played by coffee in the generation of rural employment and income. Here again no accurate statistics are available.”

He’s right. In Uncommon Grounds,  I stated that “coffee provides a livelihood (of sorts) for over twenty million human beings,” but it is probably a lot more than that. Ric Rhinehart thinks that “the number of people who depend on coffee for all or most of their living is in excess of 75 million. Ethiopia alone has nearly 15 million people actively involved in cultivating, harvesting, processing, transporting and commercializing coffee.”

Regardless of where coffee stands in the trade ranking, let’s raise a cup to all those who raise, pack and ship it across the seas.