A Tale of Coffee

Black Gold - 3/5




This documentary from directors Nick and Mark Francis is unlike most other recent political documentaries. There is nothing sensationalised, no intrusive narrator hammering the point home. In fact, about halfway through the film I was thinking that actually they should be making their point a bit stronger. The fact that I left the cinema fuming with righteous indignation is a sign of the blatant injustices of the global coffee trade which are simply presented and allowed to speak for themselves.

The film also has one of the year's unlikeliest but most compelling heroes as it follows Tedesse Meskela (a gentle man but one of faith and conviction who believes not only in the justice of his cause, but the quality of his product) of the Orumia Coffee Growers Co-operative around the world, trying to get a fair price for his growers so they can afford such luxuries as enough to eat, clean water and schools for their children. In fact going from a week where I've spent hours trying to get reluctant pupils into school to watching people who value education so highly and yet cannot access it, the contrast couldn't be higher. Unfortunately for Tedesse the market seems stacked against him and more and more of his farmers are turning to growing Chat (an addictive narcotic banned in the US and much of Europe, but widely used in East Africa) instead.

The documentary largely refrains from a name and shame approach, but does point out the majority of the global coffee trade is controlled by four companies - Kraft, Nestle, Proctor and Gamble and Sara Lee, all of whom declined to appear. It also shows us staff at the original Starbucks claiming they were in the people business, before showing us the area where their Ethopian Coffee is grown and children are turned away from a therapeutic feeding centre as they are only mildly malnourished and therefore can't be prioritised for support. Not all representatives of the coffee industry come off in a bad light - spokespeople for Illy and Taylors, come across rather well in their refusal to bow to the global market which dictates that the price per kilo for coffee is $0.60, whist the production costs for a small farmer in Latin America is $0.90.

The real on-screen villains are the EU and US representatives at the WTO meeting in Cancun, Mexico. The inequity of the negotiation process is obvious, but when talks break down because the developing world countries refuse to bow to agendas that continue to discriminate against them in the global market this is presented as a failure to grasp the intricacies of world trade, or a "won't do" attitude. As the US representative chillingly says: "We have an agenda on many fronts and will continue to strive to break open new markets by one means or another".

To leave you with a few more figures:

• Africa is now more dependant on foreign aid than it was 20 years ago.
• During that time, the continent's share of world trade has fallen to just 1%
• An increase of another 1% would bring in 5 times more than Africa currently receives in aid, but the system is stacked against them.

And if that's not one of the best arguments for fair trade, I don't know what is.