Black Gold – an extraordinary documentary about coffee

Black Gold – an extraordinary documentary about coffee

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.’

Black Gold is a 78-minute documentary feature from Mark and Nick Francis which provides an extraordinary vivid and remarkable insight into the lives and challenges facing coffee farmers in Ethiopia. These producers supply some of the finest coffee in the world but who are struggling to survive because of the obscenely low prices they get from multinational coffee exporters and roasters. For a £2 tall latte, less than 2 pence goes to the grower – a pitiful return for the creator of the raw coffee beans that we turn into a multi-billion dollar pound lifestyle industry at retail level.

The film offers economics students so much – the trading on the floor of the New York Board of Trade Exchange, the monopsony power of the multinational coffee buyers bidding for coffee in an Ethiopian auction house; how a simple coffee bean can have value added to it to generate the billions of pounds of profits enjoyed by shareholders in Starbucks; we understand more of the role of incentives in allocating resources - many Ethiopian coffee farmers are ploughing under their coffee trees and planting - instead – narcotics provide a better price.

In the film, we follow the journey of Tadesse Meskela around the world in search of buyers for and a better price for the coffee of the farmer working for the coffee producers’ cooperative. We witness the breakdown of the trade talks in 2003, we see at the end of the film some glimmers of hope that the Ethiopian coffee producers might be starting to see some of the benefits of Tadesse’s work in creating higher revenues that can be reinvested into the social development of one of the poorest nations on earth.