Coffee At Sea

Shipping companies cannot catch a break. First the Ever Given gets stuck in the Suez Canal, severely impacting international trade, and now a bunch of rebels in Yemen are obstructing the flow of goods—including coffee—through the Red Sea.

Houthi rebels, who control much of Yemen, have launched more than 30 attacks on cargo ships over the past six weeks, including firing rockets in the vicinity of several vessels and hijacking one. There have been no fatalities. The group’s stated aim is to put pressure on Israel to end its assault on Gaza, which has been in full force for more than three months and killed over 24,000 Palestinians. (Whether that aim is credible is another matter entirely.)

Luckily, shipping companies can call on the support of the most powerful country on earth, and the UK, to retaliate by launching dozens of deadly airstrikes on areas of Yemen controlled by Houthi fighters. US President Joe Biden said that he will “not hesitate to direct further measures to protect our people and the free flow of international commerce as necessary.”

Ah yes, international commerce. In the wake of the Houthi attacks, several large shipping companies like Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd said they would suspend their Red Sea trade routes. “30% of global consumer goods and container shipping goes through Suez,” Marco Forgione from the Institute of Export & International Trade told Time Magazine. “That's everything from clothes to washing machines and electronics as well as tanker shipping—oil, gas, palm oil, wheat, corn, tea, coffee.”

So far the coffee industry as a whole has been almost silent about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, something I wrote about back in November. Coffee is a globally-traded commodity and thus is intertwined with geopolitics in a way that the industry loves to ignore when convenient. However, whatever justification there was for ignoring the crisis is no longer applicable when coffee is literally caught in the middle.

Europe is the world’s largest market for coffee, consuming nearly a third of all coffee produced globally in 2021. Traditionally, coffee grown in Asia and East Africa is shipped to Europe via the Red Sea and Suez Canal, a much faster journey than the extended route around the Cape of Good Hope.

Green coffee importers have already warned customers of delays, with some rerouting their cargo around the Cape and warning of increased cost. “For South-East Asian and East African coffee en route to Europe, unintended consequences include a rise in freight costs as some shipping companies have introduced surcharges to account for the now-extended transit times,” the International Coffee Organization said in a statement.

Since I wrote my first piece on the subject, another 10,000 people have been killed in Gaza, the majority women and children, and now the conflict has spread to the birthplace of the coffee industry. Still no condemnation of Israel’s actions in Gaza or the disproportionate response from the US and UK in Yemen, no statement from the Specialty Coffee Association or the National Coffee Association—just hand-wringing over the impact on trade.

While it is widely accepted that coffee originated in Ethiopia, Yemen is the bridge which connects the drink’s historical birthplace to its modern ubiquity. It’s possible, Mark Pendergrast writes in his book Uncommon Grounds, that Ethiopians first introduced coffee to Yemen during an invasion in the sixth century, while in the 15th century Sufi monks in Yemen used coffee as a stimulant to stay awake for midnight prayers. The Red Sea port of Mokha became the center of coffee trade and hastened the drink’s spread to Europe.

At least a few coffee news publications have started to cover the situation, albeit in euphemistic tones and devoid of context. One article in Coffee Business Intelligence discusses the impact on shipping and coffee prices without mentioning Gaza, the Houthis, or Israel once. It’s like shipping delays are happening in a vacuum. In fact, in this case, context is everything.

Some—including the US president—have dismissed the Houthis actions as piracy, and opportunistic at that. While ostensibly only targeting Israeli-linked ships, Houthi rockets have also aimed at vessels with no ties to the country. Whether or not the Houthis’ stated aim is propaganda or not, the simplest solution to this “shipping crisis” is for the US and UK to put pressure on Israel to stop its bombing campaign, and the coffee industry can in turn put pressure on various governments to step in.

The worldwide coffee industry is worth some $142 billion, while the wider economic impact of the industry in the US alone is $342 billion. There are many coffee brands with revenue in the billions. All this to say, the industry (at least in the global north) is very rich and thus very powerful. Yemen, a country foundational to the history and mythology of coffee, is being bombed by two of the biggest coffee-consuming countries on the planet.

I’m not saying the coffee industry could stop the crisis, but it could be trying. As I said in my November piece, there were plenty of specialty coffee shops in Gaza before the air strikes began. Cultural pressure, political pressure, it all helps—however, the focus of the industry right now seems to be whether it’s acceptable for the SCA to pick an automatic espresso machine as the official machine of the 2024 Latte Art Championship.

Whatever your feelings about the Houthis’ more generally—they are allegedly backed by Iran, and have their own accusations of human rights violations—it’s impossible to deny that their tactics have made an impact. Shipping costs have skyrocketed and countries from Saudi Arabia to China as well as the EU parliament have called for a ceasefire in Gaza. The retaliatory air strikes by the US and UK, which forced aid organizations to suspend humanitarian efforts in Yemen, have been condemned as unconstitutional by Democrats in Congress and the list of lawmakers calling for a ceasefire is growing.

In 2021, the coffee industry came together for Amal Yemen (“Hope for Yemen”), “a spontaneous movement designed to illuminate Yemeni coffee history, culture and arts while raising funds for humanitarian relief efforts.” The campaign, spearheaded by Intelligentsia and the Alliance for Coffee Excellence among others, arose in direct response to the decades-long civil war that had by that time already killed hundreds of thousands of people.

“As the largest humanitarian disaster in my lifetime, it became obvious that we, as a coffee industry, needed to respond and provide awareness and hope for a country that has been devastated by this ongoing crisis,” Alliance for Coffee Excellence Executive Director Darrin Daniel said in a press release at the time. Amal Yemen’s backers included the SCA, La Marzocco, Sustainable Harvest, Royal Coffee, and Cropster, and the events raised money for Mercy Corps and Médecins Sans Frontières to support humanitarian efforts in Yemen.

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find any information on how the event went, how much money was raised, or what (if any) future plans there might be, as all social media accounts have been silent since 2021 and my emails haven’t been returned.

Back then, a wide selection of luminaries and companies from across the coffee world united to raise awareness and money for those most affected by war. Perhaps because the Yemen civil war was less easily linked to US and UK involvement (although both countries were very much involved) and thus big brands and organizations felt safer voicing their support for the civilians being killed. Or perhaps it was because their coffee deliveries weren’t at risk.

The specialty coffee industry thinks of itself as, well, special. Special in terms of coffee quality, in the way it treats the people who grow the product, and in terms of the ethics with which it approaches trade. But the ongoing silence around Gaza, and the hyperfocus on shipping costs and delays without grappling with the reasons behind the disruption, reveals that specialness to be superficial.