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Comment by whatever1 | Hacker News Reader

They could set a 1000% tax on the coffee produced, if they can consolidate control. Latin America is 50% of the world coffee production. What will Starbucks / Nestle do? They will just pay up. They can even go against the families of the execs to make their case about the new price.

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> What will Starbucks / Nestle do?

Finance wars. Like with the "Ten Cents War": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific

They tried this before with fruit. The US companies just sold their interest in production and have plenty of other options for acquisition if they try to tax beyond the relative ease of South America verse anywhere else in the global south.

I would agree that letting black market bs continue will eventually lead to groups that could threaten global control on random other commodities but that's no reason kick the can further down this road.

Part of the reason such a large percentage of coffee is grown there is because it's cheap. The cartels can (and do) make profit on legitimate crops, but they can't magically rewrite the rules of capitalism.

Coffee beans are notoriously picky about their environment. But with modern technology, it wouldn't surprise me if large companies would resort to growing it in artificial greenhouses, or putting more stock in breeding plants that can be grown elsewhere.

>They could set a 1000% tax on the coffee produced.

No they couldn't. That'd just mint another cartel run black market that they don't control and that cartel would tax the black market coffee at substantially less.

You can kind of think of the current drugs situation as a "so big the number doesn't matter, it's a non stater" percent tax.

That new cartel would invite a war against it. These disputes are not resolved through capitalistic means. You cannot just price out the big guys.

How is that any different than the current situation where the current cartel is fighting with the government?

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