Many people start the day with a few cups of coffee, or if you’re like our very energetic team at Ecotopia - a few pots of coffee. But have you ever thought where it comes from? If you haven’t checked out “Black Gold,” the acclaimed documentary that takes a look at the multi-billion dollar coffee industry and the poor farmers who cultivate the beans, then you should! You probably will never set foot in a large supermarket to buy your coffee again.The film follows Tadesse Meskela, the General Manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union, as he visits coffee-growing regions in Sidamo and Oromia, as well as a coffee processing center, a coffee auction house, and his union’s headquarters in Addis Ababa. He also travels to England and the US in an effort to promote Ethiopian coffee by eliminating the numerous middlemen.With great frankness, Meskela uses “Black Gold” as a stage to describe the chronic situation Ethiopian coffee farmers face. When the price of coffee hit a 30-year low at the start of the Millenium, farmers struggled to feed their children and send them to school. Some quit farming. Others began growing a more profitable line - a local narcotic banned in the US and Europe. With their families malnourished and being forced to travel long distances to accept foreign aid, some farmers saw no alternative but to bring their families to government feeding centres.So why do they call it black gold?Coffee is traded as a commodity—just like oil or gold—and is second only to oil in commodity value. Because of the production surplus brought about by sun-grown coffee, the price of coffee has been chronically depressed on the world market, making it difficult for farmers to make a good living from year to year.The price of coffee is rising, but little has changed in these communities. In Ethiopia, country that depends on coffee for about 40 percent of its export revenue, farmers make as little as 2.5p for every cup of coffee sold in Europe. Meanwhile, multinational coffee corporations collectively rake in as much as £160 billion each year, according to the film.
So why buy Fairtrade?
Fair trade organisations work directly with cooperatives of small farmers to eliminate much of the middleman costs and provide the growers with a stable price that ensures a reasonable standard of living. For instance, in 2004 the UK Fairtrade market guaranteed participating coffee growers a minimum of 126 cents per pound for arabica coffee beans, compared to a world market price of 52 cents per pound. Many fair trade organisations also encourage their growers to employ sustainable farming practices (such as organic and shade-grown).
