Will 2020 be seen as a good year for coffee?

2020 will, inevitably, go down in history as a bad year, there is no way of getting around it. COVID-19 has seen to it that businesses have suffered and, of course, people have died from a terrible disease, but it is having long lasting effects on communities all over the world, take Brazil for example.

Brazil was badly hit by COVID-19 and lost many lives but now the effects can be seen in other ways including a bumper coffee bean crop that is so large that the country is running out of space to store the beans. Exports are down because the traditional marketplaces for coffee, America, Canada, and Europe have all had lockdowns imposed and demand for coffee, whilst growing, is still relatively flat.

Even storage facilities in North America and Europe are overflowing with coffee beans and orders for more from Brazil and elsewhere in the world are slow to materialise.

In Brazil 2020s coffee bean harvest is expected to reach 68.1million bags; but this is not good news for the growers. As the market has shrunk so too have the prospects of good money as the coffee futures markets around the globe have seen a 40 per cent fall in the prices paid for coffee beans.