How a cup of coffee explains global inflation

In today’s Big Story podcast, what makes coffee a perfect product to explore the world’s rising costs is its ubiquity. You can get it virtually anywhere in the world and dozens upon dozens of countries grow, produce and export it. No one factor in any one nation or continent can fully account for why your latte costs more.

Gavin Fridell is the author of Coffee, and the Canada Research Chair in International Development Studies at Saint Mary’s University. He joins us to discuss the factors behind increased coffee prices, and how we can make the industry more equitable.

“The challenge is the way the global coffee system is set up,” he said. “It’s not so much about the prices we do or don’t pay, it’s about how much of that price makes it to the workers or the farmers that need it.”

So how does the coffee industry work? Why and how is it changing? And what can that tell us about everything else?

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