 The price of coffee beans hits a 12 – year high today. I thought there might be some kind of coffee – market story, like we saw with cocoa earlier this summer. But the main driver of coffee prices right now is simpler: Colombia has had a few years of weak coffee harvests because of too much rain, which has reduced the global supply. And coffee drinkers keep buying coffee, even as prices rise, in other words, demand is unchanged. The higher price of beans – up about 40 percent since March – means higher prices for the coffee you buy by the pound. But it probably won’t affect the coffee you buy by the cup. Smuckers, which sells Folgers and Millstone coffees, recently said it was raising its prices because of the higher cost of beans. Starbucks, however, said it would absorb the higher cost of beans without raising prices. “You see it much more in the grocery store because the raw materials are a big factor of cost,” Jose Sette of the International Coffee Organization told me. “In a coffee shop, your big expenses are rent and labor.” While real – world supply and demand is the big driver of the price of beans, there may be some speculative action in coffee business in the future. But futures (期货) of the high – grade Arabica beans are traded in the US, where regulations prevent speculators (投机商) from controlling the market, hoping such things won’t happen just as in London summer market. That suggests that prices should fall when supply improves – which may happen next year. Some experts say that farmers in third world countries won’t actually benefit from higher prices in this case. When the price difference is due to supply and demand, the profit of the seller usually doesn’t go up. 小题1:Which of the following is the best title for the passage?
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