“Those who set the table are not necessarily the ones who sit down and eat at it,” runs the old proverb. And as a controversial new documentary tells it, those who provide our morning coffee are not the ones left with a sweet taste in their mouth – in fact, quite the opposite.
“Black Gold: Wake Up And Smell The Coffee,” a new documentary which was shown earlier this month at the Children’s Media Project at 20 Academy St. in Poughkeepsie, explains how the inequities of free market economics combined with raw financial power results in a grossly unfair international coffee trade. Although coffee is an $ 80 billion-a-year industry and the second-most valuable trading commodity in the world after oil, the system by which it is grown, processed and traded skews the lion’s share of the profits to a few major companies while leaving the small farmers who grow three-fourths of the world’s coffee impoverished.
“It’s the private traders who have gotten fat,” an Ethiopian coffee farmer complains against a rich background of rich coffee fields near the beginning of the film. “They block others from coming in.”
Although coffee is grown in such disparate regions as East Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, the film appropriately focuses on Ethiopia, which was the birthplace of coffee. The name “coffee” is derived from the Ethiopian province of Kefa, and it was from there that its cultivation and consumption spread to the rest of the world.
Yet despite this great gift to humanity – the ignition of so many people’s mornings – and the fact that Ethiopian coffee beans continue to rank as the world’s finest, the actual producers of this “black gold’ live in conditions that range from stark impoverishment to outright famine.
Filmmakers Nick and Marc Francis explain that the problem has many dimensions. Coffee is grown so widely that supply usually exceeds demand. Also, the system for buying and trading it relies on many degrees of middlemen.
But the chief culprits in keeping the price of coffee so low that the farmers who grow it can barely eke out a living are the great multinationals that dominate the world market for the drink – Kraft, Nestle, Proctor & Gamble, and Sara Lee – who have enormous pull at the commodities exchanges in New York and London where current prices are set and futures traded.
It wasn’t always this way. From the early 1960s to the late 1980s, a series of International Coffee Agreements set the price of coffee by limiting excess supplies and using a quota system that stabilized the market, keeping prices relatively high. At the time the United States supported these measures because it feared that Third World poverty might fuel the spread of communism, and the resulting boost to these countries’ economic development would be in America’s interest, but the end of the Cold War led to a complete reversal of this attitude. The U.S. pulled out of the agreement in 1989, prices plummeted and misery ensued for coffee growers.
Much of the documentary follows the lonely efforts of one man, Tadesse Meskela, who is an ethnic Oromo from southern Ethiopia, to fight for a fair price for the quality coffee grown by his people. As the head of the Oromo Coffee Union, which represents 74,000 farmers grouped into 101 cooperatives, he travels to international fairs with samples of coffee, hoping to make deals that bypass the middlemen and the commodities exchanges. He also lobbies groups like the World Trade Organization, hoping to get it to change course on coffee.
“Our main aim is to bring more money into the coffee grower’s pocket,” Meskela tells the camera. “World trade is unfair. Our hope is that the consumers will one day understand what they are drinking, and ask the companies to give us a fair price.”
It is unlikely, however, that consumers will ever truly understand the repercussions of the way the world coffee trade is currently organized unless they are exposed to some of the disturbing images seen in this film. Viewers see the beginnings of a famine in Sidama province, one of Ethiopia’s richest coffee growing areas.
Quite unlike the famous scenes of Ethiopian famine from the 1980s, which all took place in the arid north of the country as a result of drought and war, these are images of starving children set against lush and rich vegetation, and ample rain. The cause? With the region’s agriculture devoted entirely to coffee, and the price of the commodity forever plummeting, these farmers simply cannot afford to buy food to feed themselves and their families.
In such dire circumstances, people take desperate steps. “Chat fares better then coffee in terms of price, that is why we grow it,” says one farmer, referring to the powerful and debilitating narcotic leaf that is chewed in much of the Horn of Africa. The phenomenon of honest farmers turning to growing illegal plants that are used to make drugs is world-famous from the case of Afghanistan, where the failure of the international community to follow up on its promises of reconstruction have led farmers there to plant opium poppies that supply 92 percent of the world’s heroin.
While the growing of chat is far less internationally destabilizing, this documentary shows that the poor farmer/narcotics farmer can have poisonous effects all over the globe.
Emily Bennison, director of media guild and exhibitions at the Children’s Media Project, said that she feels films like “Black Gold” are a source of information, artistic edification, and potentially activism that can lead to social change. “Movies like this get people to think of the wider impact of our small choices,” she said.
To learn more about the film “Black Gold,” visit www.blackgoldmovie.com. The Children’s Media Project can be found online at www.childrensmediaproject.org