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Augustine Sedgewick: I would buy stock in Monster energy drinks. Something would fill that space. If we can synthesize hamburger at this point I would assume we can synthesize coffee.Mark Pendergrast: You would have a lot of people having withdrawal symptoms. A lot of people would have headaches and be grumpy. Some people have even been known to throw up. Thankfully it would only last a few days… People might turn to soft drinks, and then they'd be drinking a lot more sugar.
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Sedgewick: They start to work at the local coffee-flavoured Red Bull dispenser. But the number of people employed in the coffee industry can vary, from landowners, or those working on plantations. If there are 150 million people reliant for everyday livelihood, probably there will be about 149 million who will be really happy to not have to go to work tomorrow. Because a lot of the jobs that exist in that sector are really tough jobs and that includes producing and serving coffee.Peter Giuliano: A coffee shop or a small coffee roaster is one of the really positive, and accessible small businesses people can start with not a huge amount of investment. I used to have a coffee roasting company. A lot of our customers were in small towns that had lost their industry, in North Carolina or Virginia. Someone would take their savings and open a coffee shop in the community and it provides a gathering place. It's part of the signs of a neighbourhood that is thriving is the existence of a coffee shop. And we tend to think of the big businesses, but there are over 2,000 roasters and 4,000 small coffee shops around the US.North America is only one end of the global trade. What happens on the growing end?
Sedgewick: The problem with putting coffee at the centre of a national development strategy is that coffee is grown in many places around the world in the global tropical belt. The fact of its widespread cultivation very often means that in the coffee sector there is a race to the bottom in terms of price. When you're talking about plantation cultivation you're talking about people working on plantations because they have no other way to eat. And so when big cash crops go away or crash in price then you're talking immediately about hunger and starvation.
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Sedgewick: It's an interesting question because what are cities now? They're basically coffee shops and banks. Starbucks is the public washroom. It's become public space not just for people who live outdoors, but it's the place where people go to think in public. There's surely some emotional attachment that people have to those spaces that prepare this thing that is more or less the same everywhere you go. You have to think that if coffee went away that emotional attachment would take new form.
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Pendergrast: Not much grows where good coffee grows—between 3,000 and 6,000 feet above sea level in semi-tropical areas where the temperature never freezes. They would probably start growing more coca leaf, which grows at about the same altitude as coffee. That may have a negative impact on people and the drug trade.Giuliano: Almost every answer is ecologically worse than coffee. The easiest one is cattle raising. And cattle raising is terrible on erosion, it requires cutting down the forest, whereas coffee can be grown within indigenous forest.Follow Samantha Power on Twitter.