Multinational coffee companies now rule our shopping malls and supermarkets and dominate an industry worth over $80 billion - but what price are African farmers paying for the price of our coffee?
Tadesse Meskela is a man on a mission to save Ethiopia's 74,000 struggling coffee farmers from bankruptcy. Tadesse is manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union.
The supply of coffee on the world market used to be regulated by the International Coffee Agreement until its collapse in 1989. Since then the price of coffee has fallen to a 30 year low.
Globally two billion cups of coffee are drunk every day. But Ethiopian coffee farmers get a tiny fraction of the price paid for a cup of coffee by the western consumer.
Four multinational companies dominate the world coffee market - Kraft, Nestle, Proctor & Gamble and Sara Lee. The international price of coffee is established in New York and London.
As his farmers strive to harvest some of the highest quality coffee beans on the international market, Tadesse travels the world in an attempt to find buyers willing to pay a fair price.
Chains of middlemen lie between coffee farmers and the roasters who prepare the coffee for sale to the consumer. The aim of Tadesse's co-op is to break these chains, and increase the end price to the farmer.
Business for the giant coffee shop chain Starbucks is booming. But life in Sidama, Ethiopia, from which the US multinational gets its coffee, is grim. A famine is in progress, and the low price of coffee is making people poorer.
Meanwhile Tadesse is in London looking for customers for his fair traded coffee. But competition for space on the supermarket shelves is intense. He makes the case for consumers buying fair traded goods.
On a global scale, Africa is the only continent in the world to have got poorer in the last 20 years. It has become more dependent on emergency aid from countries like the US than ever before.
Developing world countries argue the rules of global trade are biased against them, and that if they were allowed to compete fairly they would need far less aid.
But the World Trade Organisation, dominated by the rich countries, gives them little hope of things changing.
|