Vices of coffee trade and coffee house: exploiting the growers, sleeping in Starbucks, quackery and gabbling
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY COFFEE-HOUSE CULTURE. Four volumes, 1,840pp. Pickering and Chatto. Pounds 350. By Markman Ellis, editor. 978 1 85196 829 9
The film Black Gold begins with a horrible sound, a nasal rasp like pigs snorting at a trough. This sound is being made by a rare breed of American coffee tasters, slurping tiny tastes of hundreds of different espressos and giving them very precise ratings - 89.5/100, for example. These experts, who are nerdish and decadent all at once, are like the Robert Parkers of coffee.
They seem to labour under the impression that their palates are brilliant computers, capable of distinguishing flavour within a micropercentage. One of the tasters stops slurping for a moment and turns to the camera. "There's one coffee here that is probably the best coffee that I've ever tried. Beautiful!" Halfway through the film, we hear a different sound. It is the animal wail of a child in Sidamo, Ethiopia. She has been brought to a health clinic to be treated for malnourishment. Her legs are like twigs. To her mother's distress, the clinic refuses her treatment. Although she is indeed malnourished, there are others in a still worse state who need more urgent care. This is a coffee- growing region, and no one has enough to eat, because the farmers cannot get anything approaching a decent price for their beans.
The contrast is neither clever nor original - no Western consumer can be entirely ignorant of the iniquities of the coffee trade - but the film-makers, brothers Marc and Nick Francis, bring home the injustice of the entire economy of coffee with a force that makes it seem fresh. There is none of the visual tricksiness of Supersize Me, Morgan Spurlock's attack on McDonald's, nor is it needed. Throughout Black Gold, affluent Western coffee drinkers are relentlessly juxtaposed with African coffee farmers, who receive less than 1p of the nearly Pounds 2 that is now the standard price for a regular (ie, gigantic) cup of coffee from the major chains in the United Kingdom. We see a worker in New York idly sipping a frappuccino, which she will probably not manage to finish, so oversized is it; and we see desperately poor African farmers begging God to raise the coffee price. Because of the collapse of the International Coffee Agreement - which regulated prices until 1989 - coffee prices in Africa have reached a thirty-year low. Twenty-two cents a kilo is now the market rate for unroasted beans.
"If we could get fifty-seven cents", says one Ethiopian, "we could soar far above the sky." Yet it would take twice that to provide a "good life" for the farmers - which does not mean a life with such luxuries as electricity, but merely clean water, clean clothes and the ability to send their children to school.
Black Gold underlines how particularly grotesque this poverty is, given that coffee is a more valuable commodity than it has ever been - both relative to other commodities and in absolute terms. The espresso revolution of the twentieth century turned coffee into a gourmet product, which could command high prices at the point of consumption. Ernesto Illy, whose family firm drove the post-war dominance of espresso over other forms of coffee, is interviewed in Black Gold, talking about the perfect espresso, made from exactly fifty beans or seven grams of coffee: "You have chocolate, you have flowers, you have honey, you have toast". And you also have big bucks.
Two billion cups of coffee are drunk every day, globally. Coffee is now the second most widely traded commodity, after oil (the original black gold). The total value of all coffee traded last year has been estimated at $140 billion.
The farmers harvesting their Mocha beans in Sidamo are sitting on a gold mine, but one whose value they are powerless to realize.
