Ethiopia's coffee harvest is wrapping up and coffee samples are becoming available and ready to ship in the Arcana coffee marketplace. Arcana coffee connects roasters directly with small holder farmers in Ethiopia and builds in the hard parts, integrated QC, logistics support and producer-led transparency. With every passing day, new samples are being registered on Arcana's online marketplace with all the information you'll need to help you make buying decisions and build direct relationships with farmers across Ethiopia. Registering for an account now helps you understand timelines and can assist in planning your 2026 buying with confidence, even if you've never bought direct before.
The minimum is around 20 bags and Arcana can pull multiple roasters to meet that M.O.Q. so you can participate without overcommitting. If you're curious, listen to our recent conversation on the podcast with founder Matthew Thornton. Then explore the marketplace via the link in our show notes and register for an account.
You can also book a meeting with Matthew and he'll walk you through requesting samples, the order process, pulled orders, QC and shipping once coffees are ready. Samples are becoming available now and supporting our advertisers is a great way to support our mission and map a forward to build responsible businesses with responsible pricing models. Check the show notes for details and explore Arcana coffee marketplace today. Welcome to the Daily Coffee Pro by Mapper Ford Friends.
I'm your host Lee Safar and this is episode one of a brand new five part series. And there is no guest for this series. This is the first solo series of 2026 for reference. I am recording this on March the 13th and I was supposed to be back in Dubai after visiting my family here in Australia for a few weeks.
Because of the global situation, that is obviously not the case. I cannot return to Dubai. So we are trying to make things work with the new situation. I'm setting up a new podcast studio here in Australia at my parents house so that I can continue to do the podcast and everything else is running as it would if I was living in Dubai.
We had to shift some of the guests that we were going to have on the podcast so that we could address the very serious issue that is happening and unfolding with regards to the Middle East conflict. Now you have heard me refer to that part of the world as the Middle East and many people have got in contact with me and said how as someone from the Middle East, I should consider no longer calling it the Middle East. I should consider calling it West Asia and I think that that is an appropriate request simply because of the colonial connotations that come from calling it the Middle East. So you will hear me switch between terms Middle East and West Asia as much as a lot through the series.
I'm going to try and refer to it as West Asia from now on as much as I can. And we will most likely be changing the name of our Mappaford Middle East ecosystem to Mappaford West Asia as we move forward. So that's just a quick aside. I want to address something else also.
I've had a huge outpouring of people that have contacted me to check and see if I'm okay. Thank you for everyone that that reached out. I am given all the circumstances. I'm not somebody that you should be worrying about right now, although I do really appreciate all the genuine love and concern and support.
I am safe. I happened to leave before the conflict broke out. I'm really grateful for that. The area that I live in Dubai is about 10 minutes from the airport.
It has been hit a couple of times in the last 24 hours. I'm grateful to not be there. I'm looking at the group chat for the building that I live in and it seems quite scary. So I am deeply grateful.
Even though my business has been disrupted, cash flow has been disrupted, all of that is being disrupted. I feel like we are back in COVID times and I have built these muscles in my heart and in my mind to adapt this way. So I appreciate the continued support. We appreciate the continued business.
If you do want to advertise on the podcast, please consider doing that. Join one of our Patreon groups. We have extended to two Patreon groups. We're trialing for three months to have a group that works for the Northern Hemisphere and for the Southern Hemisphere.
So if you do want to really lean into having deeper conversations about what's happening in these times, they're the best way to do that. If you are watching us on YouTube, consider watching the ads or you could consider being a paid subscriber for a few dollars. Our Patreon is also available for people to support if they would like to back what we create here at Map Forward. Our endeavor is to always make this information available to you for free.
But if you do want to support our Patreon and becoming a paid subscriber on YouTube is a great way to do that. If you're looking to advertise your business, given the uncertainty of what's happening right now, the podcast is really going to be a much better option for you than going to trade shows, given all the disruption and the increase in prices. We're going to cover a lot of that in the series. So what this series is going to focus on is war trade and coffee.
What the Middle East conflict means for the global coffee industry. And in this episode, we're going to talk about why war affects the coffee industry. So coffee isn't just about agriculture, as we all know. But we often spend a lot of time talking about the very surface level of the coffee value chain.
We talk about the producer, we talk about the exporter and the importer and we talk about the roaster as well as the cafe. We really talk about those ecosystems, but we have to stop thinking about coffee as being just an agricultural product or just about being an agricultural product that we create from cherry to green and then from green to roasted and from roasted to brewed. We have to understand that there are other mechanisms that are at play here. Coffee is logistics, it's energy, it's finance and it's geopolitics.
So it's not just agriculture. Now, I want to go through three different systems that coffee moves through to help you understand what we're going to be covering across this series. So given that coffee is one of the most traded commodities in the world, it's about 11 on the global list of the most traded commodities in the world. People often say it's the second most traded commodity in the world.
It hasn't been that since I think the early 80s. So it travels so, so far around the world and any disruptions to the ecosystems around it, energy, shipping, logistics, they all end up impacting coffee. Not just on the surface level, but there are many deeper, deeper levels. First, second and third order impacts of that happening.
So let's take a look at these three systems. The three systems that we're going to be looking at are going to be, we're going to talk about energy, so how coffee moves through the energy sector. We're going to talk about the shipping side of things and we're going to be talking about trade and finance in this episode. So if we look at energy and start off there, everything runs on fuel, one fuel or the other.
And we are not yet at a position on a global scale where renewable energy is the way our industry works. We did not get there fast enough so that when a disruption like this that's happening in this war between Israel and America and Iran, where that level of disruption where the majority of the oil supply of the world, the fuel supply of the world is created can buffer from that. So our industry requires fuel for farming machinery, fertilizer production, the transport of coffee internal to where it's being grown, whether it's transporting it from the farm to the mills or it's transporting it from the mills to the ports. We require fuel for shipping containers, so we need to get those ships across the sea to the consuming country where it's going to be delivered to.
And then in that consuming country we require energy or fuel for roasting, for distribution, for running espresso machines, for fueling our journeys to and from work, for heating and pooling our cafes, for bringing water from water supplies to our cafes. All of that and much, much, much more is why it is so important for you to start thinking about the role that energy is playing in this. And we're going to dig deep, deep, deep into this really series. So right now what is important for us to understand is that oil markets are unstable.
And the reason that they are unstable is because the Strait of Hormuz, which sits between the Arab countries and particularly the Arab Gulf countries and Iran, is being controlled by Iran at the moment and it has been shut down. So any oil that's trying to get out of the Strait of Hormuz can no longer get out of there. Also, nothing can get into there. And so what this is causing is massive volatility in the price of oil on global markets.
Added to that is that Trump will go and say, no, no, no, don't worry about it. The war's almost over. So when fundamentals initially kick in and the price goes up, Trump says something and then the prices go down. But then fundamentals kick in and the prices go back up again.
Does this sound familiar with regards to a lot of the stuff we've been talking about on the sea market with coffee recently? And this is why we've been talking about it. Markets are not rational anymore. And so if the price of oil is going to go up, the flow and effect is that the price of coffee is going to go up.
It may not only be the price of green coffee that's going to go up, but also the price of roasted coffee, independent of the price of what green coffee is doing. Okay? So the next thing we're going to talk about is global shipping. So coffee moves mostly, like almost all of it, except for a few, maybe one or two companies that I know of, that are moving with sailing boats.
And that is at the very, very early stages of that. And if you want to get in contact with companies that are moving coffee through a sailing boat, talk to Belco. They are not a sponsor of the podcast. But talk to Belco and talk to FAF coffees.
Felipe has been on the podcast a lot. Angel from Belco has been on the podcast a lot and they always appear together, mostly appear together on the podcast. They are moving coffee through sailing boat, some of it, not all of it. But the rest of most of all the coffee in the world gets moved by shipping containers.
And so to understand why the Middle East matters to coffee, you've got to understand what the map is, what the map of shipping looks like with regards to how coffee moves through the world. So I want you to think of particularly the Indian Ocean. And this will help if you're looking at a map when you do this. And in preparation for this series, I spent a lot of time researching and understanding what all the different bodies of water that coffee moves through why they're important.
And we will talk about that a lot in the next episode. We're going to cover shipping in the next episode. So if you imagine the Indian Ocean that sits between Africa and Asia, okay? So shipping, ships are carrying goods through that ocean towards Europe.
So Asia is for Asia to get coffee and all manufactured goods. Like think of all the parts that you need for roasting machines or grinders that are manufactured in Europe or you're packaging, all of that kind of stuff. But that's in Asia, in China, in Thailand, in all of those places, right? That are in Asia, but also a lot of coffee comes from Africa.
So if you've got goods that are coming from African Asia and they're trying to get up to Europe, they cannot avoid these bodies of water that we're going to talk about unless they take a very, very long route around the bottom of Africa to get and go all the way around to get to the Mediterranean Ocean, Mediterranean Sea. So if they want the fastest route to get to Europe, they have to enter the Red Sea through a really narrow passage called Bab al-Mandeep. And it sits between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula side of things and Djibouti and Eritrea on the Africa side of things. So they pass through this narrow passage.
And once they move through that, they get into the Red Sea and they pass through what's called the Suez Canal in Egypt. And the Suez Canal connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Ocean. Now the Mediterranean Ocean, just to give you some context as to why all of this is so spicy right now, all of these bodies of water, just in what we've talked about, you've got Israel, you've got Lebanon, you've got the wars that are happening in the parts of Africa facing that part of things, all of those, and we haven't even come close to Iran yet. That's just talking about things on the Red Sea side of things.
You've got Saudi Arabia there as well. So this is on the western side of Saudi Arabia, okay? And it's just that passage is very spicy right now. Now if that corridor that we just spoke of, the Red Sea side of things becomes dangerous, ships can't safely move through that Red Sea, and then they have to go through a part of Africa, the bottom of Africa that's called the Cape of Good Hope.
And then they have to go around that so that then they go north and then they head towards Europe. The catch is that the detour adds thousands of miles to that travel, thousands of miles and weeks' worth of travel time. And then if we talk about what we were mentioning about energy, the energy to fuel those ships as the prices go up are important. And very expensive.
So you'll increase in the cost of moving those goods and whether it's coffee or whether it's equipment or it's packaging or whatever it is. That cost is going to be born and carried by the entire supply chain. So that's separate of the actual increase of the price of coffee. So that, when Africa and Asia want to send goods through up to Europe, they go through the Red Sea and then onto the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean Sea.
So you might remember the Suez Canal when it got blocked in 2021 by a ship called the Ever Given. And it blocked the Suez Canal for just a few days and it caused weeks and months' worth of disruption. We are going to see much, much more significant disruption than what that created. So we talked about the Suez Canal.
We talked about Bab El Mandib. There's one other shipping channel that is important for us to talk about and that's the Strait of Hormuz. And the Strait of Hormuz is between Iran and Oman and controls a massive amount of the global oil shipments around the world. And we'll go into that in a lot of detail.
But what's really important for us to understand is if we take two different shipping routes, let's talk about coffee that's leaving Brazil and coffee that is so Brazil to Europe versus Ethiopia to Europe. So coffee that's leaving Brazil and heading to Europe, it's going to go, let's say, from the Santos port. It's going to go through the Atlantic Ocean and directly to Europe. And once it gets to Europe, it's going to get to the roaster.
But if you've got coffee going from Ethiopia, it's going to go from the port of Djibouti. It's going to head through the Red Sea into the Suez Canal and then the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean Sea and into Europe. It is going to pass a significant amount of what's happening with this conflict that is happening in West Asia right now. So shipping routes are extremely important and they are extremely sensitive with this conflict that's happening.
When a conflict happens anywhere around the world, you can bet that shipping is a significant part of one of the weapons. They weaponize shipping during this time so that they can disrupt trade. And the third thing that we're going to talk about is the trade finance. So coffee moves through a couple of different parts of trade financing.
And obviously money is a significant part of all of this. I don't for a second think that this war is just going to be fought with missiles and with drones. I can tell you just from where I live in Dubai and the areas around that. The financial systems will take a hit.
The way people's business and individual confidence in global trade and finance is going to be rocked. And all of that will also be weaponized. So with coffee, it moves through a bunch of different ways. Money moves through a bunch of different ways.
And trade financing specifically works with letters of credit. It works through export financing, trader financing and hedging. Now when we think of the way that farmers and exporters and importers and roasters use all of these different mechanisms, it's important for us to understand that intertwined with all of that is a risk appetite. And what that means is that how much risk can I and my business tolerate before things get far too volatile?
And some people have a large risk appetite and some people don't have much of a risk appetite. I like to consider myself as someone who's in between. I like to take calculated risks. But I know people who have much, much, much larger risk appetites than I've ever had for some of them.
It pays off for others. It doesn't. It's important for you to understand right now what your risk appetite is. But with all that's going on, trade financing becomes important because banks look to reduce their risk appetite when there's this much volatility.
And so what we're likely to see is that smaller exporters are going to suffer first. And the larger exporters are going to be able to buffer from this a lot more. I want you to think back to COVID times when supply chains were collapsing. What we saw was shipping delays, container shortages, price volatility, all of everything that we're seeing right now.
And I really think that we're in the beginning stages of all of this. But as we see all of this unfolding, we're going to start to see similar dynamics to what happened in my opinion. And a lot of people's opinions that are talking about this. We're going to see similar dynamics to what we saw during COVID.
And it's important for us to shift gears from wondering, is this going to escalate? Is this situation going to escalate into crisis planning for when it escalates? Because we are on the precipice of that, in my opinion. Now, in the next four episodes, we're going to walk through exactly how this conflict impacts shipping prices, producers, roasters, and the long-term future of the coffee industry.
And the focus in the next episode is going to be the shipping crisis and how coffee moves through the world in a lot more detail. So join us for that. Peace, love, and peanut butter. Have an amazing rest of your day.
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