Coffee Nerves

Latin Americans, as well as Norteamericanos, were boiling over coffee last week. The Latinos insisted that the soaring prices were wholly due to frost and drought, and they resented U.S. charges that they were gouging their U.S. customers. After President Eisenhower, himself a coffee lover, told a press conference that something should be done to reduce the price of the stuff ($1.10 a Ib. in U.S. groceries last week), Rio's newspaper Diario Carioca complained testily that "our brave and dignified friend [is] making a little demagoguery and sticking his spoon into the coffee case."

In the midst of all the international frothing and fuming, Latin Americans completely neglected to call attention to the best proof of their claim that coffee is simply moving on the age-old tides of supply and demand. The fact is that Latin-American coffee drinkers are in much the same fix as their North American neighbors. In the past two months, the price of high-grade coffee in Rio groceries has leaped from 81-c- to $1.07 a Ib.; some Brazilians have gritted their teeth and turned to a hitherto unmentionable beverage called tea. In coffee-exporting Costa Rica. President Jose Figueres declared roundly: "Our country's No. 1 problem today is our coffee shortage." The local retail price had just climbed to 90-c- a Ib., and Figueres had tried in vain to buy some low-grade Brazilian or Colombian coffee to help out. In Guatemala, the situation is almost as bad, and last week the government banned further export of lower grades of coffee.

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