how do we align ourselves and how do we take some of the dependency away from the U.S. in such an unstable U.S. and we need to address the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency.
And it can't be done overnight. But we should think about starting as exporters, we have a lot of power in that. We're the ones who are selling goods and receiving money. And everything goes through U.S.
banks at the moment. 90% business is done hedging contracts in intermediary banks. The banks, they charge you $50 to $100 per transaction. It takes two or three days, several times it's blocked.
I'm trying to do business with customers that I've done business with for 20 years, who I think are great people. And because of geopolitics, the banks, Russian clients from all over the world, who all of a sudden makes things differently, the banks are charging us spreads. So we leave on the table as exporters, millions and millions of dollars for banks. So FFR was starting to study stable coins.
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Welcome to the Daily Coffee Pro by Map It For Friends. I'm your host Lee Safar and this is episode two over five part series with Angel and Felipe everybody's favorite guests on the podcast. We are talking about coffee in 2026. And in the last episode, we talked about what 2026 looks like and where we think it might be going.
In this episode, we're going to be talking about geopolitics and how the tectonic level movements may affect coffee and what we should be aware of. So I'm going to let you Felipe, you suggested this episode. So I'm going to let you start this conversation off. There's a lot we could talk about here a lot, but I'm going to let you pick where we're going to start the conversation and we can take it from there.
Oh boy. Okay. I'm going to speak of this in terms of the coffee lines and what it means to the coffee industry. And I think we can we can also distinguish what we know, the facts that we have observed and we know, and maybe we can dip into what we think or, you know, without getting too political.
But what we think or why we think certain things are happening more as a way to help people try and predict what is happening and how to protect against that. Because this is where I think the volatility is going to be in 2026. This is what's going to drive sea market volatility, currency volatility, and you name it. I mean, tariffs, nothing's off the table more.
So this involves the reserve currencies, all kinds of things. So unfortunately, I do not think 2026 will be a will be a stable will be a non I don't think we're done with volatility. Coffee is getting better, production is getting better, but the world is definitely not getting more stable. And I think I would even risk to say 2026 is the most decisive and tense political year of our entire lifetimes.
I would agree. I think that democracy is holding on by a thread globally. And the United States is the protagonist of its demise, which is really wild to say, especially for me, as someone who grew up in the US as an American citizen, the strength of Kool-Aid and watching and I feel for American citizens for everyone. It's destabilizing emotionally.
It brings a whole bunch of risk. People are being harassed. You know, you've got the closest comparison to Nazi Germany. I think it's possible in terms of how unstable and how censorship and everything is going.
So we have the Department of Justice that just started to attack Jerome Powell. And there's so much stuff happening that the news can't even keep up, right? Which is perhaps the most important thing to our conversation is the stability of the US dollar because coffee is priced on the New York sea market. And in US dollars at East Arabica.
And so I don't believe in AI bubble. I don't believe in any kind of bubble personally. I don't believe in, I'm not a Ray Dalio US dollar will go down, reserve currency. I think that the world is actually like a few microeconomists that I read about, but like everything operates on the US dollar, all the hedges, all the bank systems, everything.
All, you know, the world has decided to grow based on debt. I don't even see government debt as a it's a it's a plan thing. I don't think it's it's necessarily a threat. I think because we're not growing in terms of the amount of people in the workforce, we have to grow somewhere.
And I think I think governments and politicians have seen that growing based on debt is something that is interesting. And so governments all around the world, they have to serve as their debts in US dollars. So when every time Brazilians export, they get US dollars. And it's just a cycle.
So what could bring that down, you know, our wars are, no one gives up a reserve currency lightly. And the US is, you know, completely unpredictable, completely unstable. So our job is to mitigate risk. And we have to say in 2026 that the US is a risk and the US dollar is a risk.
So we've seen the last week, the medical sewer, so the Southern Kong South American countries finally come to agreement with European Union after 25 years of conversation, of negotiation. And that will stimulate more trade between South America and European Union. So South America is smacked in the middle of the Cold War, between US, China, and now Europe, and all these influences. So, you know, I don't think that democracy is stable in Colombia, as I'll probably say, but I don't think that the government, the president of Colombia is very comfortable right now.
I don't think democracy is safe in Brazil. We have elections this year, with Lula as a front runner. Last time we had elections 2022, Trump backed Bolsonaro people, tried to overthrow the government after the last election. Now, things were a little different, Biden was president then, but now who knows what's happened with Trump?
So it's going to be very wild in terms of currency exchanges. And I think that's what the volatility will be. Okay, there's a lot there. I really appreciate you anchoring the conversation there.
I would like to say, first of all, fuck ice. And second of all, what I would like to say is that I want to tell you guys a story, actually. I was standing in a line at a place that the three of us were, remember the boat that we took when we went to the old sort. So I was standing in line to get a ticket.
And it was a very busy day. And I knew the people who were like, I didn't know them, but I had seen the people that were standing in front of me. I turned around and a man inserted himself in front of me in the line. And I said to him, oh, no, so actually the lines at the back.
And he said, I don't know what's wrong with you. I've been standing here the whole time. And I thought, what am I going to do right now? I said to him, actually, you weren't the end of the line is back there.
It was massively crowded. People everywhere. There's a lot like, it was really long lines. And I could see what he was doing.
He said, I don't know if you're going crazy, but I have been standing here in front of you the whole time. And you know, the first person I thought about was Trump. I thought, and I was thinking about leadership. I was thinking, where are we that people not only are trying to push in in lines, they are now feeling like it is okay to tell you that you're crazy, because you have a different reality to what they want you to believe.
And I said to him, listen, this is between you and your God. If you think it's okay to push in line in front of me, you must need it more than I need to be in your position. So go. He said, no, no, no, no, no, no, sister, no, you're understanding it wrong.
We no longer know what the truth is and what the social contract is. And that is being fed by what's going on in the volatility in places like the US. And the ramifications of that is that people get scared. And this is where I want to go to you on Hill and talk about Venezuela and Colombia.
Because that is really like, that took the temperature to a thousand this year. And people started asking, what does Venezuela mean for the coffee industry? What does what's going on in Minneapolis mean for the entire US? Does this mean that I can go to the US or I can't go to US?
Should I be sending my coffee to the US? Or should I not send it to the US? What does democracy mean anymore? Does this mean there's going to be chaos everywhere?
Does this mean that the whole of Latin America is going to be a problem for everybody? So what are your thoughts there? I think we are going to leave some really dark times. I think what I see is that basically it is a state capitalism, I would say.
What we are what we are seeing. Yeah, because it's it's basically expanding by my strength. Where can I have some? Where can I take this or not from?
Yeah, not even for my country, but for my companies, for my big, large companies. So I think it's it's really, really, really dark era that we are approaching. So in terms like democracy and others, I think they're in big risk for what you were saying about Colombia. I don't know if you saw this, but last it was last week.
There was the government they were doing, he was calling for a national strike for the sovereignty of the country. And just one hour before, he had a phone call with the president Trump. And then he, the president from Colombia, he had an interview and he said, I had this phone call because I can be brave, but I can also be immorational for my country. And he said, I feared what could happen in the country.
And right now he's going to be, they're going to meet at the White House in Washington. And it can also really change also from one minute to the whole reality. Because I can tell you that if I write here, they were really happy with what's going on in Venezuela, with Trump threatening the President, the Korean president of Colombia, Pedro. But if he meets and even away the Trump administration, finds they're going to be good for them, they could then support them.
And then it changes completely. And I think that's what is happening in Venezuela, in Venezuela. They did not took the Chavismo out of the country. They just took the president mode.
The regime. The regime is not gone. Yeah. No.
And who is the current president? Is the former vice president? Yeah. And she was, and she has been there forever.
I mean, since the Chavismo started. And business-wise, it could be the same thing. I don't know if you knew this, but the largest market for France, for the cars. For sure.
Yeah. Before, yeah, before, before, before all the Embargos, their young hat, what's by Iran? Wow. I didn't know that.
So basically, tomorrow, if the US decide to attack Iran and then put another administration, and they say, right now it's safe to invest there, there will be some business for other countries and companies. So it's really, it's really a time where, on my perspective, it only matters how strong you are and how can you show this trend, which is terrible, because look what happened here in Colombia. The president had just, just for what happened, I think all of his advisors said, okay, listen, calm down. Stop talking loud.
It's not the time for it. We cannot afford and we cannot face it. And I think that this lack of, it's like everyone's trying to, it's peacocking, right? Everyone's trying to figure out who's the strongest person in the world and who's the strongest power in the world.
And they're going to any length that they can to figure out that order. And why are they doing that? We are really destroying any kind of, in my mind, civility that we have built up since World War II. We are really destroying the order of, and you know it's there.
Go ahead, please. Yeah, right. Before, some people call them racist, xenophobic, whatever, they cannot anymore say what they were thinking. And that was good, you know, right now, you can say, and more than that, it can even kill someone.
Yeah. Some countries and authorities would consider it as fine. And to be clear, that's disgusting. I would say that the Europeans are looking at the world, like what is going on?
This is a nightmare. There's still some sort of, some sort of civility in the European Union. In the rest of the world, this is cowboy land. You know, the Americas are just wild west and Putin and China are, you know, the authoritarians, but the US pulled out of the west, and that's what's happening.
I think that the deal between Merkel, Sweden, and European Union, I think, was a huge win for the European Union, and I hope that that will make Europe stronger. So I think the Europeans are quiet, but they're transiting. I think they're in shock to have lost it, the partnership with the US. Yeah.
So the deal is over the next 10 years or so. Most, I think, or all, between the European Union and Merkel, we'll go to zero. So, you know, European cars are 37% taxes, wine is, I don't know, more than 80%. So for Belco and Fafel, it will be great because our totes are a sailboat project.
We'll start to be able to fill the sailboat with wine and cheese. The great, we'll start drinking French wine. So, you know, I think that I would like to make a prediction. I think UDR is going to be scrapped.
That was going to be my best congratulations. Yeah. Yeah. If it continues, I would say it's going to be a version of it that basically doesn't resemble even what it started.
So, you have the Europeans having to deal with the rest of the world, which is kind of, as Angel said, the law of the strongest. So, you've got Brazilian businessmen who are, you know, ahead of the whole beef industry who are negotiating for Trump and Lula in Venezuela. So, in the beef industry, if you would look at it, it's more than 80% on compliant. So, there's just no way that Europe will be able to uphold UDR.
I think coffee is probably the most compliant out of all the commodities. So, I think it will be completely scrapped. You know, it's an exception of maybe some kind of corn or some kind of farmers in France, I think, in Europe. I think UDR was a huge win for, sorry, Michelsou, in your opinion, it was a huge win for both continents for Europe.
So, what does that have to do with us and our business and what we do? We need to mitigate risk and we need to align how to work. And I think that perhaps we need to look at how to hedge our currencies and work differently. So, how do we align ourselves and how do we take some of the dependency away from the U.S.
in such an unstable U.S. and we need to address the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. And it can't be done over night.
But we should think about starting as exporters, we have a lot of power in that. We're the ones who are selling goods and receiving money. And everything goes through U.S. banks at the moment.
You know, 90% business is done hedging contracts in intermediary banks. The banks they charge you $50 to $100 per transaction. It takes two or three days. Several times it's blocked.
You know, I'm trying to do business with customers that I've done business with for 20 years, who I think are great people. And because of geopolitics, the banks, you know, Russian clients from the world who all of a sudden makes things differently, the banks are charging us spreads. So, we've been on the table as exporters, millions and millions of dollars for banks. So, if we're starting to study stablecoins and, you know, tether the euro, other things like that that we can start to, it's kind of like, you know, 10, 15 years ago, we used to make text messages and international calls and spend hundreds of dollars on this very video chat would cost us fortune.
And that's free. But for the banking system, we're still paying hundreds of dollars per transaction. When the technology is changing, we don't have to be doing it. And it doesn't, it's 24 hours and it's free.
So, I think that this is something that we should start looking at first to free ourselves from. The bank has its place, especially for loans and stuff like that. But then think about being able to not be so dependent on the US dollar. Map of Ford has actually transitioned our business.
We now accept cryptocurrency and stablecoins. And we have been doing that for about six months. And I did it for a couple of reasons. One, we want to be able to work with anyone anywhere in the world that we think the values are aligned and we don't want currency to be something that is a barrier for us.
And so I picked three different cryptocurrencies and tether as a stablecoin and USD as a stablecoin. And I found that people are, it was a way of understanding what people's values are. When I mentioned to them, if you would like to pay Map of Ford this way, we are open to receiving payment this way. The energy of the conversation shifts when you start to talk that way, with people who are forward thinking.
You come to realise that they are like, oh, thank God, I'm speaking to somebody who understands that the current financial system is in serious trouble. The current foreign exchange system is in serious trouble and the way that we do business is going to be forced to evolve over time. And I would encourage anyone who's interested in doing that to figure it out. Whatever it is that you have to do to figure out how to work with specific, I don't use shitcoins, you know, figure out, I'm dealing Bitcoin, ETH and XRP at the moment, as well as tether and USD stablecoins.
The transactions are instant. There's almost, like the fees are something like 30 cents, right? Just as a platform transaction fee. It's nothing.
And it's instantaneous and it's secure. Go ahead. I think it's just one thing I want to be clear is they're stable because they're packed to something. So tethers still packed to the USD.
There are now, you can find stablecoins packed to the different kinds. So as we say, as entrepreneurs, business can be, it should be political, as a small business. Maybe we can start offering to our European customers, for example, to pay in euros and tie that to the euro. So that will over time increase the liquidity in the euro and that will over time change the reserve currency status and that geopolitically.
You know, that's the thing we say, your conscious consumerism, right? It's slow, but it's there. It's everything from stopping to buy from Amazon to, you know, stopping support, this current US administration or whatever. So I think that as a small company, you can position yourself.
And like you said, it can ring a note with a customer. And I think the most important part of this whole shift with regards to the way that we actually pay for things is that business owners have more power to make decisions about the way that they choose to pay for things and charge for things than they ever have. You are no longer required or locked into doing things the way that like our parents' generation had to do things. It does require some courage though at this stage because the people who do choose to use these newer methods of paying are taking a leap, right?
And it's important for us to talk about it here so that people know that people that they trust are actually taking these chances and it has been deeply beneficial for my business to be able to do it this way. But there is risk involved in it. And one of those risks, for example, if somebody says to me, I'd like to pay you in Bitcoin, I'm happy to receive payment in Bitcoin. But what does that mean?
It means that we're going to calculate the Bitcoin equivalent of the USD that you were going to pay me or the Euro that you were going to pay me. And we're going to calculate that as a Bitcoin equivalent. You're going to transfer me the same amount in Bitcoin. The day that that that arrives in my wallet, 10 minutes later, the Bitcoin price might tank.
And if the Bitcoin price tanks, the risk is on me then. Equally though, the risk of the price of that Bitcoin may skyrocket. On the other side of that, if I receive that money in Tether, it's not changing. It's going to say, if I receive 10,000 USD worth of Tether, it's going to remain 10,000 USD worth of Tether.
So you take your risk where you want to take your risk. If a customer comes to you and says, I want to advertise on your podcast and I want to pay in Bitcoin, and I think it's too volatile right now, I can make a decision to say to them, I can't do it in Bitcoin, I can maybe do it in Ether, or I can do it in Tether. Because in their wallet, they can convert Bitcoin directly into Tether and send it to me the same way, because all of the majority of the wallets do that and it's still stable. So what you're doing is you are moving that into a different ecosystem where you have more control than in the usual governmental financial systems that currently exist.
And that is a decision that we all need to make as business owners, whether we want to step into that or not. But it is worth at the very least exploring because continuing to trade coffee in US dollars is going to keep your risk and volatility very high. So looking for other options, there is no reason that anybody has to stay stuck to the way that we've done business in coffee for the last 50 years. That's not necessary, not in a year like 2026.
Go ahead, please. I think you said something you said courage, but I will also say other word or other thought maybe is that most of the time we do things because that's how they are done or they have been done. And I think that as you said, of course, we need to analyze, analyze when nobody, any other solution, but it really works. As Felipe was saying, like for customers in Europe, what is the sense to make transactions in US dollars?
For example, as a Colombian company, we cannot have US dollars in the country. We have here the banks give you with their compensation accounts. So you have them outside of the country, but then it's the same if you have a US dollar or a US dollar. So what is the reason is because it's done that way.
And it has always been done that way. And I think that's the biggest risk I would say for humans because we do things because that's how they are done. And if 2026 is going to do anything, it's going to challenge that. The way things have always been done is what's going to be challenged to your point in the last episode, Felipe.
The volatility is continuing and the status quo is going to get challenged. And we're going to have to figure out how to navigate that as we move through 2026 and doing things the way they've always been done because they've always been done that way is probably going to increase your risk if you're following the crowd in a year as crazy as what 2026 could be could be a very dangerous way to move forward. Having said that, the next episode, guys, we're going to talk about the value of specialty coffee versus commodity in 2026 for different stakeholders in the value chain. And that's an important part of that phrase.
So join us for the next episode. Peace off and peanut butter have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting Mapper Forward our guests and advertisers on social media. Also subscribe, hit the like button, leave a comment and share this episode with a friend to help get the show to more people.
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