Black Gold: Wake Up and Smell the Coffee (TreeHugger)

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Black Gold is about coffee. How buyers come to Ethiopian farmers and offers them eight cents per kilo which ends up selling for $ 213.00 as retail brewed coffee. How Tadesse Meskela tries to organize the farmers to grow better coffee, and to sell to the cooperative so that they will get a better price.

Then to developed world, where more than two billion cups of coffee are drunk every day. Where retail sales from coffee total eighty billion dollars a year. Where four multinationals dominate the market (Kraft, Nestle, Proctor and Gamble and Sarah Lee, who all declined to be interviewed for the film). The price paid is determined in New York and London, as the second most actively traded commodity in the world.

The coffee trader has as many screens as Mr Universe in Serenity; he is a coffee master of the universe, moving tons, making profits. Then onto Starbucks, to see the first store, how proud the manager is of this great institution.

Back to Ethiopia, where the Starbucks coffee comes from. They used to make enough money from coffee to live but not any more. The hospitals are full of starving children, people cannot live on what they are earning.

In London, Tadesse tours a supermarket and cannot find his coffee. He says "Our hope is one day the consumer will understand what he is drinking, and will ask these people who are not having fair trade coffees to pay us a fair price. That is our hope.- the consumers can bring a change if awareness is given to consumers."

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Tadesse returns to Ethiopia with a little money from Fair Trade sales, not enough to build a school that they need, but as one grower says " Even if I don't have any money, I can sell my shirt and give the money, so that my children can learn and for my country to grow."

There is a contradiction here. It is one thing if coffee was cheap, but at a Starbucks or high end coffee shop or in a can from Illy it is not. For those of us who do not drink Nabob or Nescafe we should demand that our premium priced coffee be fair trade or we should pass it by. There is a price to be paid to ensure that people are not exploited; we are paying that price already; we should demand proof of it or leave.

This is not a review, it is a synopsis. You cannot review documentaries of such straightforward power, you can only tell people about them and hope they watch and learn. ::Black Gold, filmed, directed and produced by Marc Francis and Nick Francis.

watch the trailer:

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Black Gold: Wake Up and Smell the Coffee

by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 06. 1.07

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Black Gold: Wake Up and Smell the Coffee

by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 06. 1.07

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