World Trade: The Overflowing Cup

Way down among Brazilians, Coffee beans grow by the billions So they've got to find those extra cups to fill They've got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil.

—The Coffee Song

They sure do. Piled in warehouses throughout Brazil are 52 million bags of coffee—nearly enough to meet world demand for a full year. Trouble is, 40-odd other countries are also growing—and stockpiling—coffee. Last week, faced with yet another surplus crop year, representatives of 67 nations, including all the major coffee producers and consumers, met at the U.N. in an effort to restore order to the glutted world coffee...

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