Coffee Culture: a documentary about Fair Trade Coffee

To understand what "Fair Trade Coffee" means, watch this documentary.

Black Gold (2006) is a documentary about Ethiopian coffee growers struggling to cope with exploitation by Western multinational corporations. The film's narrative technique is very simple, and the camera constantly switches between two worlds that are very different: the elegantly dressed Italians "start a good day with a cup of coffee in the morning", while the coffee growers are shirtless and live in poor houses; at the coffee market in New York and London, no one pays attention to the grower's question "Can you raise the price of coffee to 5 birr per kilogram (about 0.6 US dollars)?" Let's have money to build schools for our children "; the female manager of the world's first Starbucks in Seattle is very proud of the coffee culture represented by Starbucks, unaware that Ethiopian women work 8 hours a day for less than $0.50; representatives of major economic powers at the WTO global conference negotiate behind closed doors the most favorable trade strategy for them. In order to feed their families, growers have to cut down coffee fields and plant Chat(a hallucinogenic drug) at a higher price.

One of the most memorable scenes for me was when a grower said,"We don't need Western help, and we don't want our children to see us receiving handouts." We have coffee, and we can live on our own labour, if we can be given a fair price." But the closing credits make it clear that kraft, nestle, procter & gamble and saralee--the world's four largest multinational coffee companies--and starbucks declined invitations to watch the film.

It's a heart-wrenching film to watch, because you have to accept the fact that every cup of coffee you drink, knowingly or unknowingly, increases the exploitation of African and South American coffee growers.

Simply put, organizing coffee growers to work directly with independent coffee merchants to make prices transparent and fair is Fairtrade Coffee. After the film came out, it quickly received great response internationally. Starbucks has been forced to say it will use Fairtrade coffee beans globally by 2015. But at home, we still can't get Fairtrade coffee in Starbucks for a while.

So what can we do to reduce the unfair coffee trade? Try to buy coffee with Fairtrade labels, such as British brands Percol or Café Direct; if you frequent Hong Kong, look out for shops that use Fairtrade beans, which are quite common in Hong Kong; or just go to Tudou and watch the documentary in its entirety.

To act in support of fair trade requires money (fair trade coffee is more expensive) and patience (not necessarily better). Can we not relieve our inner guilt when we take a cup of coffee in this way?