The Long Game in Soft Commodities: 2025 to 2030
Building the macro skillset from field to market
Introduction:
Soft commodities, coffee, cocoa, sugar, cotton, and orange juice, are where markets meet biology. You don’t drill for these, you grow them, and that makes them fragile. A frost can wipe out coffee trees for years, a virus can gut a cocoa harvest, and a single policy move, whether a tax, a quota, or an export ban, can turn a local shortfall into a global squeeze.
And this is the core point I want to make up front, in resources and commodities the real edge comes from building a macro skillset. You need to understand weather, policy, logistics, currencies, and how they interact, so you can read what is happening now and see what is likely next. Ratios might look neat on a spreadsheet, but these markets move with weather, policy, and logistics. Get the macro right and the numbers take care of themselves.
That is why I use two overlapping lenses.
The first is Jim Rogers’s long-cycle view, prices trend higher when years of under-investment collide with steady demand.
The second is Marc Rich’s trader instinct, logistics, politics, and financing decide who actually gets the goods when things are tight. Put those together and you see why softs can look slow for a while, then move violently all at once.
The 1970s set the pattern for how these markets move. After Bretton Woods ended, inflation surged and the dollar weakened just as global food reserves were running low. Sugar prices jumped in 1974, and coffee and cocoa spiked more than once.
In the 1980s, the trend reversed. Paul Volcker brought inflation under control, crop yields improved, and prices fell. The 1990s saw global supply chains expand, giving buyers a false sense that someone, somewhere, would always have enough to sell.
In the 2000s, that belief broke when bad weather and years of under-investment hit together. The 2010s turned into a cycle of weather scares followed by supply recoveries.
The 2020s have been one crisis after another, pandemic disruptions, war, and climate extremes. The cocoa rally in 2024 and the coffee spikes in 2025 were not accidents, they were the release of pressures that had been building for years.