Fair trade is a movement that seeks to diminish the vast disparity between the huge profits that multinational corporations make from certain common products, on which we all depend in our daily lives, and the meager – often not enough to live on – income the actual producers of those products receive for their labor. This issue was dramatized in respect to coffee by the film Black Gold, which was shown at All Souls Church on Sunday, September 30, 2007, at 1:00 p.m. The film was introduced by Scott Codey from the New York Fair Trade Organization.

    Well justifying the name "black gold," coffee is the most valuable trading commodity after oil; the industry is worth over $80 billion, and over two billion cups of coffee are drunk every day. Under the present system, the leaders of the industrial nations set the rules of global trade, which are generally unfair to the reality of developing countries. Prices are set and controlled by several multinationals, including Kraft and Starbucks. Moreover, many middlemen – roasters, packers, traders, shippers, and warehouses – intervene between the farmer and the store where you buy your coffee. Each of these middlemen takes a cut of the profits – with, of course, a multinational taking the biggest cut of all.

    The film focuses on the situation in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee and the largest producer of it in Africa. But it is also one of the poorest countries in the world, too poor to subsidize its farmers as the United States and other industrial nations do. (Africa is the only continent to get poorer over the last twenty years.)

    The basic alternative to this exploitative system is fair trade, which  -- according to the International Fair Trade Association (as quoted in the New York Times on October 2, 2007) – is an effort to ensure the "social, economic, and environmental well-being of marginalized small producers.'" Fair trade is concerned with the condition of the farmer and those who work for him – in contrast to the organic movement, which concerns how food is cultivated.

    The aim of fair trade is to connect the producer and the consumer directly via an alternative economic system where farmers' unions or cooperatives allow producers to jump over the middlemen. These cooperatives work to give growers more money so they can feed their families, have clothes and clean water, establish schools, and avoid famine. Fair trade organizations visit farmers to verify the quality of their coffee and certify that they are meeting certain criteria – including, among others, that they use neither child labor nor harmful chemicals.

    The film focuses on the efforts of one man -- Tadesse Meskela, general manager of a coffee farmers cooperative representing 101 coffee cooperatives --  to save 74,000 struggling Ethiopian coffee farmers from bankruptcy or from turning to the easy profits gained by growing a narcotic, as they may do "out of desperation." "Africa now is more dependent on emergency food air than ever before," with seven million people in Ethiopia needing it.

    Besides making people aware of the exploitation that makes possible the steaming cup of coffee you drink every morning, the movie suggests ways you can help to increase Africa's share of world trade: over the last 20 years it has been 1 percent; if it increased by that much, it would produce five times what it gets in aid.

• You need to exercise your power as consumers.
• Buy Fair Trade coffee and urge your stores to carry it as well.
• When shopping, look for the Fair Trade logo, which indicates that the farmer is paid a decent price -- on coffee as well as on such other products as bananas, rice, sugar, tea, wine, pineapples, cocoa, and cotton.
• Encourage parents and teachers to use Fair Trade products, such as chocolate, in fundraisers.
• Finally, check out the Fair Trade Coalition's websites: www.fairtradecoalition.org and www.fairtradenyc.org.