Coffee is the second most actively traded commodity on the world market; 2 billion cups of 'black gold' are drunk every day in a retail market with $80 billion a year. All of which must sound like a joke in rather poor taste to the headmaster of a school in a coffee-growing district in Ethiopa who can't afford blackboards for his classes as so little of this wealth has trickled his way. The injustice of this is compounded by Ethiopia being the birthplace of coffee and a country that still produces some of the most highly esteemed coffees in the world.
It would have been easy to make this a strident documentary about the manifest inequities of global trade. It isn't, indeed some of the introductory shots of the extraordinarily beautiful Ethiopian countryside look like they could have come from a travelogue, and at the end the film’s approach recalls the poetic qualities of Reggio’s Powaqqatsi. However, it leaves the viewer in no doubt as to how to make the connections between products, places and people as it follows the manager of the Oromia coffee farmers co-operative, Tadesse Meskela, as he tries to find new markets and a fair price for his product.
The facts regarding the presentation of the coffee market can be debated – as is being done over at the black gold website (www.blackgoldmovie.com), where factors such as the role of the Ethiopian government regarding land ownership have been raised – but the film's primary purpose is to raise consumer awareness about just what they are drinking and the processes by which it has come to them from its raw state. With this awareness comes responsibility to choose a coffee in full knowledge of where your money is – or more importantly, isn’t – going, and, not least, a responsibility to yourself to really find out what a good cup of coffee tastes like. As a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony is out of the question for most of us – coffee beans washed, roasted over a fire, ground in a mortar and pestle, then added to a clay jebena atop glowing coals in a small brazier, where as it brews, frankincense is added to the coals – the words from the chairman of the Illy coffee house will for now suffice. A little way in, he talks of the flavours that you should get from a really good cup of coffee: tastes of chocolate, flowers, fruits, honey and toast with a concomitant complexity of aromas. He then says how many beans are needed to make such a drink; on average, 50 coffee beans to each expresso. When we see the women working in a coffee processing centre in Addis Ababa, where they are sorting through the beans by hand, selecting and rejecting every one, it gives you a jolt to think of fifty of the beans under such fingers as theirs making one shot of coffee. The women shown earn less than 50 cents a day for their work.
Confronted by the many varieties of coffee on the shelves of a UK supermarket, Meskela says, 'our hope is that one day the consumer will understand what he is drinking.' This film will help.
An investigation into the global coffee trade, illustrating how poor farmers in Third World countries are being left penniless as their richer First World counterparts continue to pay them far less than they should. Without being strident, the film presents a highly persuasive case that in this day and age, to buy coffee (the second most actively traded 'commodity' in the world) that doesn't remunerate the growers fairly, is frankly immoral. The film follows Tadesse Meskela, manager of the Oromia Coffee farmers Co-op in Ethiopia (the birthplace of coffee, and the producer of some of the highest quality beans in the world) as he tries to find new markets for his product.
Tell No One
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Black Gold
