Shippers, including exporters and importers, move coffee beans in their raw form from producing countries to consuming countries. Roasted coffee goes stale quickly, so most of the coffee you buy in the supermarket is roasted in the United States. Shippers track and process the coffee beans, negotiate prices, and handle shipping arrangements. In some coffee-producing countries, government agencies control exports, but in most parts of the world, coffee exporting is a private business. Most coffee beans are shipped in containers, either poured into burlap bags or blown straight into the containers and then sucked out into silos at their destination. The trip by slow boat from South America to the United States (and the wait in ports) can take as long as a month; trips from Asia and Africa take about twice that. After inspecting the beans, the importers deliver them to roasters.

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 by Bill Kinzie, courtesy of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.

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