Coffee or Black Gold

I am one of those people where I cannot function without my morning coffee. That is why this documentary was so interesting to me, I wanted to know what my coffee obsession was doing to those around the world. I also was looking for ways to make my love for coffee more sustainable and see if there was a way for me to get it in a better way.

The documentary starts by asking farmers how much do you think coffee costs in the western world. None of them knew, but coffee where they were cost $0.12. It costs them 12 cents for

 coffee, yet in the western world it costs $2.90. The laughter that came from the farmers was shocking, it hit me, why do we have to charge so much for coffee while in other parts of the world coffee can go for 12 cents. We can make 80 cups of coffee from one kilo of coffee, that is just insane. These farmers are coffee farmers, they make if they are lucky $0.57, when they should be getting about $230, why are we doing this? No wonder these farmers don't want to work, or farmers are committing suicide because they want to settle their families debts. It makes me mad as a Starbucks and Biggby coffee fan to know that coffee is going for so little in these places, we charge so much for this but yet the guy who's doing the hard work is getting squat.

The farmers call coffee gold, we hear about it all the time, we see it advertised everywhere. There is a Starbucks inside Targets, and we joke that there is a Tim Hortons on every corner in Canada. Through out the movie you see Starbucks everywhere, the workers in the factories make less than a dollar a day and the World Trade Organization won't do anything to help them, they care too much about the trade than they do about helping the little guy out. We see these farmers struggle and we watch the process that the coffee goes through and yet we cannot seem to wake up and see that we are the ones that are killing the little guy in the coffee industry. 

We need to wake up and smell the coffee