CSR at the Movies - Black Gold

For this movie-inspired resource for teaching CSR (and globalisation) we go back to 2006 - to the launch of an award-winning movie about the global coffee trade…

After crude oil, coffee is the second most valuable traded commodity. UK film-makers British Marc and Nick Francis examines the lives of coffee growers of the Oromia Region of southern and western Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee. The film follows Tadesse Meskela, the General Manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union, as he visits coffee-growing regions in Sidamo and Oromia (including the Kilenso Mokonisa Cooperative in the Bure Hora woreda in the Borena Zone of the Oromia Region), as well as a coffee processing center, a coffee auction house, and his union’s headquarters in Addis Ababa. He also travels to England and the United States in an effort to promote Ethiopian coffee by eliminating the numerous middlemen.

The movie description from its website explains:

As westerners revel in designer lattes and cappuccinos, impoverished Ethiopian coffee growers suffer the bitter taste of injustice. In this eye-opening expose of the multi-billion dollar industry, Black Gold traces one man’s fight for a fair price.

CNN Report on the Black Gold Movie and Industry Response

More4 Trailer for the UK-showing of Black Gold

Interview with film directors Marc and Nick Francis on BBC World News. They challenge Kraft, one of the world’s largest coffee companies on their buying practices.