The Dryden Theatre -- Black Gold: A Further Investigation

Black Gold: A Further Investigation

~by Inés Toharia Terán, L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation

tadesse

“Consumers can bring a change if awareness is given to consumers”

~ Tadesse Meskela in Black Gold

Black Gold premiered during the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and presents the audience with an unfortunate irony about a very familiar product consumed by over 100 million Americans every day. Americans are actually the consumers of a third of the world’s coffee while every second over 4000 cups of coffee are consumed worldwide. However, it is a product that few consumers know the repercussions of using. Black Gold follows Tadesse Meskela, an Ethiopian manager of a Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union, as he travels the world looking for a better price for his farmers’ coffee. Ethiopia is believed to be the first area where coffee beans were first harvested, and consumed.

The irony we are confronted with is that while the global coffee industry is booming, coffee farmers in Ethiopia can barely survive with their coffee’s revenue. Coffee represents an industry worth over 80 billion dollars, and coffee is now the most valuable trading commodity in the world after oil. However, the price paid to farmers remains so low that many have been forced to abandon their coffee fields.

I, myself, became personally interested with the coffee industry when I began to shoot a documentary about the coffee situation in El Salvador in 2004. El Salvador is a small country in Central America but it once produced a big part of the coffee we consume. It was the country’s top export. The kind of coffee grown there is arabica coffee which, as coffee lovers know, is premium, high quality, coffee.

The current coffee crisis can be summarized by saying that the output of the product exceeds the demand; in other words, there is much more coffee being produced, than consumed. Due to this excess, international prices have dropped. Many coffee producers and laborers, especially those working in small farms, are losing their jobs or are abandoning their farms and migrating; some are turning to other crops (often illegal but, at least, profitable). The coffee crisis is destroying the livelihoods of 25 million coffee producers around the world. But while many are now unemployed or slowly starving, big companies are making profits out of the crisis.

The problem began in 1989. Up until then, coffee prices were controlled, like oil prices are. However, this system collapsed, and the United States withdrew from the decision-making group that had been establishing a quota that prevented coffee prices from falling too low. It was then that other countries, especially Vietnam, began to grow huge amounts of coffee after they started receiving loans — loans were supplied by international banks and by what is generally called the “Big Four” (Nestlé, Proctor & Gamble, Kraft and Sara Lee).

The “Big Four” supported the coffee boom in Vietnam, and encouraged the population to grow coffee. But the land in Vietnam is not suited for growing high-quality arabica beans, so cheaper beans, known as robusta beans, were cultivated. Robusta beans are generally considered to be of lower quality, and to hide the substandard taste, large food corporations introduced new flavored coffee: hazelnut flavor, mint, Irish cream, vanilla… Ironically, this kind of flavored coffee is usually marketed as “specialty coffee” while, in reality, it is just bad coffee in disguise.

Big companies are now making enormous profits while lowering the quality of the world’s coffee. Sales have gone from $30 billion to $80 billion just since 1990. The “Big Four” companies deliver between 70% and 80% of the coffee sold in the US. They market many popular brands: Nescafe, Folgers, Jacobs, Yuban, Maxwell House. And they now use a much higher percentage of robusta in their coffees rather than buying arabica from smaller growers in Africa or Latin America, where production costs are much higher than in Vietnam. Therefore, high-quality arabica growers from countries such as Ethiopia and El Salvador are those who have been most damaged by the crisis.

So, what is being done? And what can be done? The International Coffee Organization, in order to survive to the crisis, has proposed destroying the worst (the lowest quality) 5% of the crop, helping to deal with the excess amount of coffee supply. European countries are beginning to embrace this methodology. However, the US is not. And “the Big Four” are opposed to this plan too. These major coffee companies were actually approached by the Black Gold filmmakers but all four of them declined invitations to be interviewed for the film. A market-based solution is Fair Trade coffee, which can now be bought by the consumer in some stores. But a solution that makes the coffee market work for both the big corporations and the farmers has yet to be put forward.

The price of coffee has risen slightly over the last two years, but little has changed in the farming communities. The repercussions of this crisis will last for decades, and it will certainly not help the affected developing countries. All of this is happening for a variety of reasons, but the most outstanding cause is that companies like the “Big Four” wanted cheaper coffee.

The implications of Black Gold extend well beyond the realm of coffee. As the filmmakers themselves put it, “We wanted to urgently remind audiences that through just one cup of coffee, we are inextricably connected to the livelihoods of millions of people around the world who are struggling to survive.” And as Tadesse Meskela says in the film, “this is not just an issue that affects coffee, but all the products coming from the poorest countries in the South.”

For further research, please visit these websites:

~ Black Gold Official Website

~ Oxfam. Coffee Campaign

~ Fair Trade-Oxfam

~ International Coffee Organization

Articles related to the coffee industry:

~ “The Coffee Crisis in Context”

~ “Mugged, Poverty in Your Cup,” Oxfam International, report released in 2002

~ “The Coffee Crisis Continues.” Oxfam International, report updated in 2005

~ “Crisis in a Coffee Cup,” Fortune Magazine, Nicholas Stein, December 9, 2002.

~ “Coffee Crisis - the Hard Realities that Fill Your Cup,” MSNBC, August 26.

~ “Waking Up to a World Coffee Crisis,” St. Petersburg Times, David Adams, August 11, 2002