A friend recently told me he had read in a newspaper that coffee is the world’s second largest crop.
Because of my employment at The Western Producer, he thought I might know if that was true.
I didn’t think so because it’s always been my understanding corn, wheat and rice are the planet’s three most-produced crops.
A quick internet search proved me right, and coffee was not on any of the lists that I found.
So what exactly had my friend read?
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I found the story he was referring to, and it turns out the quote that had caught his attention was part of a discussion about the state of the world’s coffee farmers: “We have coffee farmers who produce the world’s second-largest commodity … and a lot of them still don’t have access to basic needs and struggle to provide for their families.”
I decided to search for “coffee, world’s second-largest commodity,” and bingo, I was in business.
It turns out a Starbucks official had told a U.S. Senate committee in 2017 that “coffee is the second-most traded commodity after oil.”
So that’s where that comes from, I thought. But is it right?
Helpfully, a division of the Poynter Institute, which is a well-thought-of journalism research and education centre, had decided to fact check this particular statement.
Keep in mind that the numbers are a little old now, but the general trend is clear.
PolitiFact, the Poynter’s fact-checking arm, said the oil export market was estimated to be US$788 billion in 2015, according to the United Nations’ trade statistics branch. Aluminum trade was estimated to be $106 billion, copper $104 billion and iron ore and concentrates were $67 billion.
For agricultural crops, PolitiFact used World Bank and U.S. Department of Agriculture data to peg the world market for soybeans at $57 billion and wheat at $29 billion.
And coffee? PolitiFact was able to come up with an export number of $19 billion, while in its defence, Starbucks said the International Institute for Sustainable Development put the market at $23 billion.
So, any way you look at it, coffee is not the world’s second-most traded commodity.
This misconception has apparently been around for decades, and while efforts are occasionally made to set the record straight, it stubbornly persists — like misconceptions often do.
