Coffee Is NOT the Second-Most-Traded Commodity (Myth Busted) | Francesco’s Coffee

You’ve heard it a hundred times — coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world, after oil. It’s printed on coffee bags, whispered in cafés, repeated in business school case studies, and somehow everyone accepts it as fact without ever really stopping to ask where that number came from. The problem? It’s wrong. Completely, demonstrably wrong. And the fact that it’s wrong tells you something interesting about the intersection of marketing, coffee culture, and how easily we all get played by a good story.

Here’s what the actual picture looks like, why the myth persists despite being contradicted by every major trade and commodity organization, and what’s actually true about coffee’s role in the global economy that’s more interesting — and more complex — than the “number two” label makes it sound. The real story is about how a single crop became the world’s most geographically distributed commercial agriculture product, how millions of smallholder farmers in the tropics depend on it, and why the economics of coffee look nothing like the simple “oil vs. coffee” framework that’s been passed around for decades.

Where the Myth Came From

The claim has been debunked since at least 2001, when coffee industry analyst Talbot’s work first flagged it in published research. The International Coffee Organization (ICO), the World Bank, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) all confirm that coffee is not the second most traded commodity. The second-most-traded agricultural global commodity, measured by total trade value, is actually rice — and depending on how you measure trade value at different tiers, you can stack coffee somewhere between seventh and twentieth place, depending on the year and the specific definition used.

So why does the myth stick around? Three reasons, all of them human. First, it makes coffee sound more important than it is, which feels good if you’re a coffee professional, a coffee drinker, or a country whose economy depends on coffee exports. Second, it’s the kind of fact that sounds plausible — trade flows are complicated, and few people actually verify rankings. Third, the myth has been repeated so many times in publications with enough credibility that it acquired a kind of social truth. Wikipedia debunked it as a myth in 2012, and corrected it again in 2020 and 2025. Yet the claim still circulates. Once a story is embedded in culture, it outlives the facts that created it.

The Real Numbers: What’s Actually Being Traded

By total value of global agricultural trade, the commodities that consistently outrank coffee include rice, wheat, soybeans, corn, sugar, and cotton. Crude oil isn’t even a competitor on this list because it’s not an agricultural commodity — it’s an extractive commodity, and measuring it against a crop is comparing apples to oil derricks. Rice alone sees hundreds of millions of tons traded annually across Southeast Asia and into Africa and the Middle East, driven by massive staple demand that doesn’t exist for coffee at anything close to the same scale.

Coffee by volume is genuinely large. The ICO reports roughly 170 million 60-kilogram bags traded globally each year — which represents about 10 million metric tons of beans. The total value of global coffee trade in 2023 was around USD 45 billion, which puts it firmly in the top 20 traded agricultural commodities but nowhere near the top two. The world’s top exporters include Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, Indonesia, and Ethiopia. The top importers include the United States, Germany, Italy, France, and Japan.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. Even if coffee isn’t number two by value, it is uniquely distributed geographically. Rice is grown in very specific regions — Southeast Asia, parts of Africa, the Americas — and shipped from those few places outward. Wheat, corn, and soybeans are grown in fewer countries still. Coffee is produced in roughly 70 countries between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, and almost all of those producing countries are low- or middle-income nations that depend on coffee as a primary economic driver. Coffee is uniquely central to the economies of places like Ethiopia, Burundi, Rwanda, Honduras, and Guatemala in ways that no other agricultural commodity is for any specific region.

The Farmer Economics Nobody Talks About

Here’s the part of the coffee story that matters more than trade rankings but gets less attention: the farmer. Over 125 million people worldwide depend on coffee for their livelihood, according to the ICO and the World Bank’s development reports. Of those, roughly 25 million are smallholder farmers — typically working farms under 5 hectares in size, most of them family-owned. They don’t get the “number two commodity” glamour. They get market price swings that can drop their income by 60% in a single year.

The coffee commodity market trades two grades: Arabica and Robusta. Arabica, the specialty-grade bean, trades on the Intercontinental Exchange in New York. Robusta, used mostly in instant coffee and espresso blends, trades on the ICE Futures Europe exchange in London. Both are subject to extreme price volatility driven by weather, disease, speculation, and currency fluctuations. A 2023 coffee price crash saw Arabica dip below USD 1 per pound on the C-market, the lowest in 16 years. A 2024-25 price spike saw it climb past USD 3 per pound — roughly triple — as Brazil’s harvest suffered from drought and coffee leaf rust. Farmers at the bottom of that chain experience those swings as survival or ruin, depending on where they are and whether they’ve built a buffer from Fair Trade premiums or direct-trade partnerships.

This is why the “number two commodity” framing feels insulting to many coffee professionals and farmers. It makes coffee sound big and important, when the reality at the source is that it’s often fragile, dependent on middlemen, and shaped by market forces that don’t benefit the people who actually grew the beans. The people who benefit most from coffee being big are the roasters, the traders, and the brands that sell it at a markup — not the farmers who produce it at thin margins.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is coffee really the second most traded commodity in the world?
No. That’s a myth debunked since 2001. Rice is the second-most-traded agricultural global commodity by value, and coffee ranks between seventh and twentieth depending on the year and the metric used.

How much is the global coffee industry worth?
Roughly USD 45 billion in global trade value for green coffee (2023, ICO). Retail coffee — the value once it’s roasted, packaged, and sold — adds another several hundred billion annually when you count the entire downstream chain: roasters, cafés, and brands.

Sources

• International Coffee Organization (ICO). “Coffee Trade Statistics.” ico.org
• World Bank. “Coffee Markets and Prices” (2024-25 report).
• FAOSTAT. “Food and Agricultural Commodity Trade” database — food.agriculture.org.
• Talbot, J.M. (2004). “Know Your Coffee.” Published critique of the “second most traded” myth.

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FCC Editorial Team · Francesco’s Coffee Co. · Ottawa, Canada