Your daily cup of coffee is the result of a complicated global trading system that tracks back to some of the poorest regions in the world. A typical coffee bean changes hands as many as 150 times in its journey to the cup. With each hand-off, a portion of every dollar you spend on coffee is claimed -- by growers, traders, shippers, roasters and retailers and all the parties involved with each of them. But the profit isn't shared equally across at least one major divide -- between coffee producers, traders and exporters in countries where coffee is grown on one side and importers, roasters and retailers in the United States on the other. Each group jockeys for a greater share of what the coffee drinker pays at the local supermarket, restaurant or cafÈ. Here's a chance to follow the bean from the field to your cup. In this interactive exercise, you get the chance to divide up $1 among the major players in the coffee supply chain. After finding out about all the players, you'll decide how much of your coffee dollar you want to allocate to each, and then get to compare how you chose to split up the profits with how they actually are split up in the global coffee market.

Sources include: International Coffee Organization; TransFair USA; Gregory Dicum and Nina Luttinger, The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry From Crop to the Last Drop (New York City: The New Press, 1999); Laure Waridel, Coffee With Pleasure (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2001); Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World (New York City: Basic Books, 1999); Faisal Islam, "Counting the Real Cost of a Cup of Coffee," Manchester Guardian Weekly (Jan. 1, 2003); Nicholas Stein, "Crisis in a Coffee Cup," Fortune Magazine (Dec. 9, 2002); Kim Bendheim, "Global Issues Flow Into America's Coffee," New York Times (Nov. 3, 2002); Peter Fritsch, "Coffee Bean Oversupply Deepens Latin America's Woes," The Wall Street Journal (July 8, 2002); John M. Talbot, "Information, Finance and the New International Inequality: The Case of Coffee," The Journal of World-Systems Research VII, no. 2 (spring 2002).

Photo credits: The photographs on the "Growers," "Local Traders," and "Your Allocations" pages are courtesy Bill Kinzie/Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Foundation

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