Soothing the Coffee Nerves

It looked as solemn, and frequently got as unfriendly, as a meeting on Berlin or disarmament. But actually, what has gone on behind closed doors at the United Nations headquarters for the past seven weeks has been history's biggest kaffeeklatsch. Everybody wanted to do something about prices and production in the glutted coffee market.

Among the delegates from 71 nations, the Latin Americans were angry at Europe's Common Market nations for clamping high tariffs on South American coffee and almost none on coffee from France's former African colonies. The Latin Americans wanted rigid export quotas. The Africans, whose beans are used mostly for instant coffee and whose coffee trade is booming on the trend to instant, wanted elastic quotas that would expand or contract with world demand. And all the producing countries wanted the Europeans to lower their high taxes on coffee (example: $1.50 a lb. in West Germany).

After oil, coffee is the biggest commodity in world trade. With overproduction and massive stockpiles threatening to collapse coffee prices, delegates agreed that something had to be done. Under the prodding of the U.S. delegation, they finally reached an agreement last week to establish a worldwide Coffee Council, which will assign tight export quotas to producing nations based on their current level of exports. But the quotas will be revised as the demand for various types of coffee fluctuates--a victory for the Africans.

The agreement was likely to stabilize coffee prices at about their current level. The 40-odd producing countries promised to use part of their fresh coffee profits to finance the development of their economies and become less dependent on foreign aid handouts.

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