Mark has been to New Orleans exactly once. His first employer (let us call it Giant Conglomerate Number One) sent him there to visit their coffee plant, just outside the city. That coffee plant---GC1's only U. S. coffee plant, and we're talking a company that makes a lot of coffee---was abandoned during Katrina, not even a skeleton crew stayed on. It will be a while before it is going again.
Will coffee prices rise? I asked, not really serious about it.
That's a real possibility, he said. New Orleans imports and warehouses all the nation's coffee, he told me. And went on to explain that it was a sort of coffee customs center, something about all the papery husks having to come off the coffee beans before they entered the United States, and "almost all of it" coming in through N. O.
It turns out that it's not actually all the coffee. The best clue I could find was this article from 2002, which seems to say that coffee comes in through four U. S. ports (New Orleans, New York, Miami and Houston) and that in 2002, New Orleans received 27 percent of U. S. coffee imports. New York imports more and warehouses more. So it's not the cataclysm that my usually knowledgeable husband claimed it was.
Still, that's a lot of coffee processing, a lot of warehoused coffee, a lot of coffee importation infrastructure under the water.
Why am I bringing this up? Because this is just one industry. It is maybe a little early to think about the economic impact of Katrina, since people are still in grave peril. But multiply this by all the commodities and other materials that pass through the New Orleans port, by all the companies that have a facility in the affected area of the Gulf Coast---the country is going to be reeling from this.
UPDATE. A sobering analysis here. H/T Jay Tea at Wizbang, where blogger Paul is safely evacuated but has a long road to recovery.
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