Coffee futures climbed to their highest level in roughly seven months this week, with arabica contracts on ICE settling up 5.89% in a single session and robusta gaining 5.34%, as traders weighed a slow-moving Brazilian harvest, a deadly earthquake in Colombia and lingering U.S. tariffs on Brazilian beans against thinning stockpiles.
ICE-monitored arabica inventories have fallen to roughly a 2.75-year low, near 226,000 bags, according to Barchart data. Brazil, the world's largest coffee producer, is running behind its usual pace: analytics firm Safras & Mercado estimated the 2026/27 harvest was about 90% complete as of Aug. 12, versus 97% at the same point last year and a five-year average of 94%, while the Cooxupé growers' cooperative put its own harvest at just over 81% complete in mid-August.
A second producer hit by disaster
Colombia, the world's second-largest arabica producer, is contending with the aftermath of a magnitude-7.4 earthquake that struck the department of Chocó on Aug. 10, killing more than 300 people and displacing thousands, according to early reporting on the disaster. The quake struck coffee-growing departments including Caldas and Risaralda, which together account for roughly a quarter of the country's output, and Colombia's national coffee growers' federation said a large share of export logistics — roads, bridges and processing plants used to move harvested cherries to market — was temporarily knocked offline in the affected zones.
Layered on top of the supply disruptions is trade policy: a 50% U.S. tariff on Brazilian coffee imports, in place since last year, has pushed American roasters to compete harder for beans from other origins, since Brazil historically supplied close to a third of U.S. coffee imports. Traders are also watching for an early El Niño pattern that forecasters, including the U.S. Climate Prediction Center, say could delay the September-October rains Brazilian trees need to flower ahead of next year's crop — a risk to the 2027 harvest layered on top of this year's tightness.
The combined pressures have kept prices elevated well above their longer-run averages even as they remain below the record highs set earlier in the current price cycle. U.S. grocery shoppers have already absorbed much of the run-up over the past year in the form of higher shelf prices for ground and whole-bean coffee, and roasters say they have little room left to hold prices steady if futures keep climbing. With Brazil's harvest not expected to wrap up for several more weeks and Colombia's export infrastructure still being repaired, traders say the market is likely to stay volatile into the fourth quarter, with any sign of rain in Brazil's growing regions or faster progress reopening Colombian export corridors a likely trigger for prices to give back some of this week's gains.
