Charmonium suppression at RHIC and SPS: A hadronic baseline

A kinetic equation approach is applied to model anomalous J/ψ suppression at RHIC and SPS by absorption in a hadron resonance gas which successfully describes statistical hadron production in both experiments. The puzzling rapidity dependence of the PHENIX data is reproduced as a geometric effect due to a longer absorption path for J/ψ production at forward rapidity.