When people buy coffee, they don’t realise they are purchasing the world’s second most traded item after oil. Coffee is essential to the economy of many countries, to the extent that a bad coffee harvest can signal economic disaster. The world’s leading exporter of coffee beans is Brazil, closely followed by Columbia. Between them, the countries own 6,617 million coffee trees. However, the Brazilians are not the world’s biggest consumers of coffee †although they do hold a very respectable 19th position in per capita terms (i.e. consumed per head of the population). Americans buy coffee more than any other nation. It is the world’s biggest coffee importer, importing 2,454, 166 60 kg bags of coffee in July 2009 alone. Germany is Europe’s biggest importer of coffee beans, importing 19,967,100 bags a year, compared to the UK’s modest 764,500. Americans drink 400 million cups of coffee a day (that’s 146 billion cups a year!) However, looked at per capita, the statistics are somewhat different. Finland imports 132,843 sacks of coffee beans per annum †about 1/3 that of the UK. However, the population of Finland is just 5 million †compared to the UK’s 61 million. If you look at coffee consumption per capita, Finland is the world leader by a head, consuming over 10kg per head, per year. By comparison, although 54% of the US public buy coffee on a regular basis, they consume just 4.2 kg †putting them in 26th place. Incidentally, Great Britain is the world’s 47th coffee consumer, consuming 2.4 kg per capita.
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