Nidal Hussain clutches a shopping bag as she crosses the four-lane street, weaving through cars and trucks that inch along a main thoroughfare in central Baghdad.

It's late morning under a sweltering sun, and Hussain has joined men, women and children walking to a market where canopied stalls line sidewalks and sometimes spill into the street. It's part of her near daily ritual of buying fresh bread, vegetables, fruits and fish to feed her family.

She steps over broken concrete and puddles of fetid water to get to the Karrada market, named for the central Baghdad neighborhood where it sits.

"Shetreed," a vegetable seller asks Hussain. What do you want?

She inspects a tomato from a green plastic crate, puts it back and chooses another.

Some of these are not that good, she says.

What do you expect with all the trouble? he says.
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Consumers got a jolt this week with news that the price of coffee was hovering near $3 a pound, the highest price in more than three decades, forcing many coffee houses to consider raising prices or cutting services.

Bad weather in the world's top coffee growing regions, a weak dollar and pressure from emerging coffee drinking markets is putting pressure on the industry, which saw coffee beans trading Tuesday at about $3 a pound - just below its peak of $3.22 a pound on Friday.

The last time coffee prices were higher was in 1977 after bad weather in Brazil, one of the world's leading coffee producers, destroyed more than half of the country's coffee crops.

"We've been hit hard for close to year now," said Martin Diedrich, owner of Kean Coffee houses in Southern California. "I can't always ask what I need to because I get push back from my guests, from my customers. So I have to take a margin hit."

Read - Say it ain't so for a cup o' joe: Price of coffee beans climb