Prices and gains in the world coffee trade

There is now an abundant literature on the need to protect the prices of the developing countries’ primary export products, but few studies trace in detail the evolution of these prices through all the stages of production and marketing up to that of final consumption in the central countries. The purpose of the present article is to examine this process with reference to coffee, a product which is of great importance in Latin America’s foreign trade, and whose final price, as is common knowledge, has risen significantly in recent years. The data considered lead the author to conclude that much of the increase has occurred in the consumer countries, where, of course, a major proportion of the surplus thus generated has remained.