Black gold. It’s a term which traditionally, and, with the continuing high price of oil, fittingly, has referred to crude oil. But the second most widely traded commodity in the world, behind crude oil, is coffee. And a documentary film now making its way into U.S. theaters has adopted the term for its title. Its subject? The global coffee trading industry, from Ethiopian hillside farm to steaming latte in Starbuck’s cafe. The documentary focuses on the ongoing struggle of small growers to, through the Fair Trade movement, eliminate middlemen in selling their coffee crops.
The fewer middle men involved in each transaction, the larger the cut of the sales price the growers will receive. The film’s central character, a representative of Ethiopia’s Oromo Coffee farmers Co-op, Tadesse Meskala, shuttles between the coffee fields and the international traders interested in their yields, with looks along the way at auction houses, production lines, roasting facilities, baristas, and ordinary coffee consumers. Contrasting the barely-subsistence-level existence of the growers with the efforts of the likes Kraft and Nestle coffee brokers to keep world coffee prices as low as possible, the film has an under-story of rising coffee demand over the past ten years, and the accompanying globalization of Starbucks. But the film, instead of taking cheap shots at Starbucks, stays focused on Meskala’s constant efforts to do end runs around the middle men and commodities traders, and work directly with the end buyers.
One of these coffee buyers, Ernesto Illy of Italy, bypasses the commodities market specifically for the purpose of channeling more money to the growers. When the documentary was first introduced at the Sundance Film Festival in February, 2006, its producers, Marcand Nick Francis, arranged to have Ethiopian coffee served to those waiting in line for tickets. But Starbucks, who refused to be interviewed for the documentary, thought it a good idea to have their own people at every Sundance screening of the film, and distributed a statement claiming “…coffee farmers should make a living wage and be paid fair prices.” Maybe now, thanks to “Black Gold”, they will be.
