The Price of Coffee
Garcia, Maria
The Price of Coffee By Maria Garcia The scent of coffee drifting through the windows of my Italian grandmother's kitchen, and upstairs to our apartment, is what awakened me every day of my...
...Indeed, Starbucks took notice...
...In July, the company announced that it would be tripling the amount of coffee it buys from Ethiopia...
...Marc wonders...
...The first thing you learn from Black Gold is that the coffee you are drinking, at your local caf...
...American multinationals like Procter & Gamble, Kraft, and Starbucks, all of which declined invitations to appear in Black Gold, dominate the coffee market...
...Black Gold, a new documentary, makes it hard to ignore the facts: Coffee is one of America's most imported commodities, and America buys more of it than any other country in the world...
...You take a cup of coffee off the counter, but you don't think how someone on the other side of the world is breaking their back to make that coffee...
...The world trading system," Meskela insists, "has to care for the poor...
...According to the International Coffee Organization, coffee farmers, who work mostly small family farms, earn two cents on every dollar spent on a cup of coffee at a retail shop...
...Black Gold begins at an international coffee cupping competition, where a judge remarks that the Harrar he's just sampled is the best coffee he has ever tasted...
...In June, when the Francis brothers were in New York, where the documentary was shown at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, they received an invitation to meet with Starbucks executives...
...We wanted to find a simple way to tell the story by focusing on the development of the character against the backdrop of the international trading system that we don't see," Marc explains...
...In the case of Ethiopia, a socialist country where farmers do not own their land, trade policy experts point to the need for domestic reform...
...Coffee accounts for 50 to 70 percent of the country's exports...
...On desperate occasions, the ritual of grinding the beans, of filling the pot with water, and setting out the cups and saucers, was purposeful and soothing, and preceded heartfelt conversation...
...Meskela, who was traveling in the U.S...
...Echoing an observation Tadesse Meskela makes in the documentary about the underpaid women who sort coffee beans, Marc adds: "All I know is they can't live on a half a dollar a day...
...The Price of Coffee By Maria Garcia The scent of coffee drifting through the windows of my Italian grandmother's kitchen, and upstairs to our apartment, is what awakened me every day of my childhood in Brooklyn...
...We just want an open marketplace...
...Harrar is an Ethiopian coffee grown by some of the 75,000 member farmers in the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union...
...If, after watching Black Gold, you contemplate the continuing disparity between the developed nations and the underdeveloped world, especially Africa, Marc and Nick Francis have accomplished what they set out to do...
...It would be wrong of us to say that we had a direct effect, but it seems coincidental," Nick declares...
...They're living hand to mouth, no social services, no clean water," he says...
...Why is such a simple idea so hard to achieve...
...in October, explains why: "Dr...
...Some companies, like the Italian multinational Illy, buy directly from select farmers, but this does not guarantee that all the farmers get a fair price for their coffee...
...In the late afternoon, nonna's friends, her compare, would come for cappuccino, and after dinner aunts and uncles would stop for a cup of espresso...
...Black Gold zips around the world trailing Meskela, and is, by turns, disturbing, upbeat, and slyly satirical...
...A telephone call in early July to Ted Davis, director of corporate communications at the New York Board of Trade, revealed that coffee prices were hovering around a dollar, a marked increase over last year when they were still at an all-time low...
...For Meskela, the solution is obvious: Farmers should receive a fair price for their coffee...
...What that broker paid for the coffee does not directly reflect how much it cost to grow it, or the quality of the coffee, but rather the outcome of trading activity at the New York Board of Trade on the day of the purchase...
...They have made it nearly impossible to think of a cup of coffee as anything but a maelstrom in the evergrowing tempest of globalization...
...This is the coffee sold as "free trade" or "fair trade...
...They pay the New York Board of Trade price for the coffee they buy...
...Coffee was the beverage of friendship and family business...
...Maria Garcia, a New York City-based writer, reviewed the documentary "The Devil's Miner" in the May issue...
...Failed trade agreements, the IMF, neocolonialism, and indifferent multinationals accomplished that...
...Through Tadesse's journey, we are able to show the audience the system so that they can make connections...
...We don't take sides here," Davis says...
...Black Gold premiered at the Sundance Festival in January and, according to the filmmakers, Starbucks employees attended all five screenings...
...An amusing scene at Starbucks' flagship store in Seattle is followed by a devastating sequence that depicts starvation in eastern Ethiopia, where the company buys the bulk of its Ethiopian coffee...
...They're not having a chance to have a fair fight with us in the free market," Marc Francis explains...
...Like Stephanie Black's Life and Debt (2001), which offers a clever, cautionary tale about globalization by focusing on Jamaica's failing farms, Black Gold uses the plight of Ethiopia's tenant farmers to illustrate the inequities of world trade...
...It's as simple as that...
...The Francis brothers do not disagree, but they argue intelligently and persuasively in Black Gold that ineffective domestic policies alone do not bankrupt a country that exports some of the most desirable coffee in the world...
...Part of the problem, according to Meskela, is that small farmers on about two-and-a-half acres of land, who produce 75 percent of the world's coffee, have no guarantees in the global marketplace...
...It can all change in a month," Nick insists...
...And, as the documentary explains, before international coffee trade agreements fell apart in the 1990s, before the IMF decided Vietnam should clear its equatorial forests to grow inferior Robusta coffee and flood the market with a cheaper product, Ethiopia's Arabica sold for about $1.27 a pound...
...The cooperative's representative is Tadesse Meskela, also the documentary's Virgil, who guides the audience through the Inferno of the $80 billion international coffee market...
...Companies that purchase coffee directly allow the cooperative to bargain for a price nearer to the value of its coffee...
...There is a direct link here, one that you don't have to be an Oxford or a Harvard business graduate to understand...
...Ethiopia represents a classic argument against globalization, but it was also the sublime irony of the country's economic demise that inspired British filmmakers Marc Francis and Nick Francis to make Black Gold: Ethiopia, the oldest independent nation in the world, is widely acknowledged as the birthplace of coffee...
...Illy says in the film that it takes seven beans to make one cup of espresso, and that means fifty-two cups made with one pound of coffee...
...or brewed at home, was likely purchased by a broker, employed by a multinational...
...That's precisely what the Francis brothers desire...
...Eschewing narration, the Francis brothers instead quote statistics from the United Nations, Oxfam, and the International Coffee Organization through intertitles...
...You can imagine that Illy is making more than $100, and that is not fair...
...Several sequences in Black Gold depict Tadesse Meskela's attempts to circumvent the New York Board of Trade price through direct negotiations with retailers...
...My farmers, for instance, are getting $1 for that pound...
...In the last decade, that dropped to fifty-four cents, and Ethiopia is now one of the world's nineteen poorest countries...
...For me, coffee is still all of these things, so thinking about it as a commodity, an instrument of political and economic manipulation, did not come easily...
...Later, when pressed, Davis admits that the multinationals enjoy an "edge...
...Mark says, "We have to ask ourselves: Has Africa moved on from the days of slavery...
...What hasn't been said is what they will pay for the coffee...
Vol. 70 • December 2006 • No. 12
