For roasters and cafes
Chuck Jones knows this industry from both sides: He owns a roastery and cafés in Pasadena, California, but around half of his beans come from his family's farms in Guatemala - one that is his and two owned by his cousins.
But at the end of July, one of his cousins in Guatemala is expected to lose his farm.
"The exporter, who he has a debt with for covering two harvests, is taking over the farm because he hasn't paid," Mr Jones says.
He says the "boom and bust cycles" of coffee pricing unfairly hurt growers like his cousin, who stand to make money only a few times each decade, especially given the access to cheaper options in the commodity market.
"As a buyer, I can easily replace that [coffee]," he adds. "But it hurts because it's my cousin, and he's losing his source of income. He's middle aged and he's been living off of the farm.
"Even though my cousin is a high quality, specialty coffee producer, he's still going to lose the farm because of the systems in place to prevent him from being able to succeed."
Mr Jones says industry leaders have been pointing out that roasters need to pay more. But to Mr Jones, who operates a business in a city with a high cost of living and high price for labour with a $15 hourly minimum wage, "there's no clear winner in the chain".
Included in his $10 price for wholesale, roasted coffee are numerous shipping and ongoing warehousing expenses, labour, machine upkeep and other financing costs.
For consumers
So how exactly does the price of a latte break down for consumers?
Mr Sette of the ICO explains that the retail price of coffee "is not very linked to the price of the physical growers".
"The amount that reaches the grower is 1-2%, but things like labour and rent, marketing, all of those occupy a big share of the final price."
Mr Jones broke down the price of retail coffee at his Pasadena cafés, and for a $4 latte, only the cost of coffee - 10% - is within Mr Jones' control. Organic milk, labour, cups, lids, sleeves, and coffee condiments all factor in.
"I don't think anybody is laughing their way to the bank," he says.
Across the country in New York City, the Think Coffee café chain's Coffee Director Enrique Hernandez told the BBC making a small latte costs the company $0.28, and is sold for $4.25 in order to pay for non-coffee costs.
That price will be going up to $4.50 this year, Mr Hernandez says, due to higher rent and minimum wage expenses.
Looking for solutions
The ICO and other industry organisations are working on changes like diversifying small farm incomes with other sources of revenue, teaching risk-management, streamlining production chains, and combating climate-change by adopting environmentally smart agriculture.
"We need to also promote consumption of coffee in coffee-producing countries, where it is often low," the ICO's Mr Sette adds. "A promising approach for, at least, the specialty coffee sector is to foster direct relationships between growers and roasters."
Higher end coffee companies like Think Coffee and Intelligentsia are examples of that partnership.
Mr Hernandez visits one of the farms Think Coffee buys from every three months. He says the company focuses on finding "vulnerable" farms rather than just buying from wealthier owners, and spends money towards building better living conditions for the farming families they work with.
Intelligentsia, which has cafes across the country, has similar practices to improve sustainability, including directly sourcing beans from Central and South America and Africa and hosting workshops for farmers.
Others in the industry have also called on big buyers, like Nestle, to pay fairer prices and not flood the market with low-quality, cheap coffees. Nestle told the BBC in a statement that it also offers training for farmers, and as "no one company or organisation can solve this issue", it is working with groups like the ICO "looking for practical and effective collective action".
Speaking at the World Coffee Producers Forum's 2019 conference in Brazil this week, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs called for the establishment of an annual, United Nations-level, $10bn global coffee fund.
It's a hefty ask considering the global AIDS fund received just over $7bn in contributions from 2017-2019. But as coffee growers are forced to weigh other options simply to survive, the spectre of abandoned plantations around the world could be enough to motivate new changes.
As Mr Sette of the ICO says: "If we don't have the investments today, we might not have sufficient coffee in the future."