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The real cost of your cup of coffee

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telegraph.co.uk

Fairtrade, rainforest-friendly, organic? And why is coffee so contentious?Part of the problem with coffee is down to geography.

Like chocolate, almost all coffee is grown in the tropics, largely in the ‘Global South’, the less developed, lower-income areas of the world.

The red coffee ‘cherries’ are picked, raw beans removed, dried, then sold to processors and shipped to the affluent ‘Global North’, where they are roasted for sale in countries like Germany, Italy, the US and the UK.The price soars as soon as the beans are roasted, meaning that while coffee is a vital part of the economy of low-income countries, most of the money we pay for our bags of Continental Roast stays in affluent nations, rather than going back to the farmers and their teams.

For £1 spent on coffee, 10p goes to the grower and 81p to the roaster and on margins.But that’s not all. There’s an environmental cost, according to coffee expert Professor Mark Maslin of University College London, author of How To Save Our Planet (Penguin, £7.99). ‘If you did the roasting in the country of production, you reduce the weight of the beans [by around 15 per cent]… saving a huge amount of carbon on the transport.’As yet, there’s no coffee that’s roasted in the country of origin available here, perhaps thanks to the common myth that it needs to be freshly roasted.

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