Comment by specialist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by specialist | Hacker News Reader

TIL To keep the price of Kenyan coffee low, the British set up markets and ratings. All the beans are commingled. Plus added bureaucracy. So no farmer would be directly incentivized to excel. Just a race to the bottom.

Insidious.

It perfectly described what Bezos did.

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Sorry, I can't quickly find the article explaining the unique history of Kenyan coffee. Will add later if I do.

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This org's page hits all the same points:

Kenya Coffee, Quality Decline & the Systemic Truth Behind the Cup https://kenyacoffeeschool.golearn.co.ke/kenya-coffee-quality...

The article I read was written by a (western) coffee buyer explaining why he can't buy beans directly from Kenyan farmers. Whereas buyers can directly in every other country.

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u/jrjeksjd8d found it. Woot!

This is the original source, linked on HN a couple months ago: https://christopherferan.com/2021/12/25/kenya-and-the-declin...

It seems like the collective washing and grading system was effective at producing high quality coffee (but not paying farmers a living wage) until the system got so extractive and climate change got so bad that farmers cut costs and started producing worse strains. In other markets buyers would go direct to the farmers for single-origin beans to encourage higher quality but in Kenya this was prohibited.

Not particular unique - this is a common practice in a lot of agricultural industries. e.g. there are wine co-ops in France where many vineyards commingle their grapes to produce a commercial volume of wine under a particular label.

What these systems rely on is a governing body that punishes producers that don’t meet the body’s standards and ruin the party for everyone else. Amazon is the governing body here and has previously shown no interest in protecting legitimate producers from counterfeiters.

If there were ratings, presumably the incentive would be to have your beans rated as higher quality.

Thus doesn’t feel particularly evil to me - though it treats beans as fungible.

Something similar is done with milk sales from individual farms in England.

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