Cinema - Black Gold

How do you like your coffee? Do you want a macchiato, a frappe, a latte, a cappuccino, an espresso or an Americano? The coffee trade is booming, worth an estimated 80 billion pounds a year, the second biggest commodity after oil, with chains popping up in High Streets like mushrooms. Must be good to be a coffee farmer at the moment, mustn’t it?
Well, no, actually, and especially if you live in Ethiopia, the birthplace of the bean. Market forces have been driving the price of coffee down, so while the fatcats at Starbucks and co have been inflating their bank accounts on the back of the boom, the farmers and sorters at source have been taking cut after cut. The price has fallen 70% since its high in 1998: an Ethiopian bean sorter earns about 10p a day, the farmer who hires him gets about 25p for a pound of coffee, which translates into abut 80 shots in the High Streets of New York, London and, yes, Lewes. Farmers are selling at a loss, just to keep in business.
This documentary (and full marks to Lewes Cinema for such a bold choice of film) looks at the scandalous facts of the coffee trade, and by doing so, points out in no uncertain terms how despicably unfair on developing countries global capitalism, powered by the policies of the World Trade Organisation, really is. It’s a fast-moving, fact-filled slap in the face of a film, which will almost certainly make you think twice abut where your next mouthful of black gold comes from. Any pastries with that? DL