Reviewed by Neil Davey
Hosted by Terence Howard
Written by Lisa Ko, Eric Martin,
Charlie Pearson& Lois Vossen
Produced by Sally Jo Fifer & Marc Francis
Certification US U | UK U
Runtime 78 minutes
Directed by Marc Francis
What is the cost of your morning coffee? If your answer is ‘around $4/£2’ then you should probably see Black Gold, a fascinating and disturbing call to arms to the world’s coffee drinkers, and find out the inconvenient beverage-related truth. And, frankly, even if you are aware of the injustices in the coffee trade, you should see this short, (not so) sweet and very pointed documentary.
Brothers Nick and Marc Francis were inspired to make the film after asking themselves one simple question back in 2002. How could Ethiopia, the world’s biggest producer of coffee, be on the brink of another famine when the world’s multi-billion-dollar coffee market was booming? The answer is, of course, blindingly obvious: the money goes to Starbucks, Nestle, Sara Lee, et al, and not the farmers. A kilogram of coffee — as the film’s main focus, Tadese Mesekela, the manager of an Ethiopian coffee farmers’ co-operative, points out — makes around 80 cups of coffee retailing at around $3, $4 a cup. For the same kilogram of coffee, the farmer will receive less than $1. The women in the industry who sort the beans by hand receive less than 50 cents for a day’s work. For the record, Starbucks last year posted profits of around $130m.
The crisis point is coming and coming fast, fuelled to no small extent by people like Tadese who’s trying to bypass the international trading system, which currently means that his farmers’ prices are set by orange jacketed chavs on trading floors the world over, and instead find buyers direct who’ll pay a sensible price. A price that means his farmers can do little things like eat, survive, educate their children. Without ever resorting to Michael Moore style tactics, the brothers Francis present the information and injustices in matter-of-fact form that will stop you in your tracks and make you question the necessity of your morning latte. Wake up and smell the coffee was never such an accurate expression.