Film Reviews	Mocha Misery by M. Faust

You don’t have to drink the stuff to know that in the past two decades the market for coffee has expanded in a way that your parents would never have imagined. And if you are a coffee aficionado, you know that our developing palette has made us willing to spend more and more for a cup that best suits out taste. If you still have a jar of freeze-dried crystals in the cupboard, it’s either for emergencies or guests you don’t particularly like.

What you may not know is that while retail sales of coffee have nearly tripled since 1990, those profits have not trickled down to the base of the industry. As the documentary Black Gold points out, the Ethiopian farmers who produce some of the most prized coffee beans in the world have not benefited from the expanding market: On the contrary, since the collapse of the International Coffee Agreement in 1989, they have seen their profits steadily fall.

This is no small problem for Ethopia, where coffee is 67 percent of the country’s entire economy and one million people depend on it for their livelihood. In the film’s math, farmers are lucky to get 23 cents per kilo, an amount that will eventually retail for $230. Because entire communities rely on coffee production, the loss of income has devastating effects that cannot be absorbed in other ways.

Rather than rely on talking heads and endless statistics (in which they are not lacking), filmmakers Mark and Nick Francis put a human face on their documentary in the person of Tadesse Meskela, representative of the Oromia Coffee Union cooperative. It is his job to secure better prices for the farmers in his cooperative by attempting to sell directly to European and American distributors, eliminating at least some of the middlemen.

Admirable as Mr. Meskela is in the pursuit of his tasks, though, Black Gold leaves you wishing for more dry facts. While an end title notes that representatives of the five companies that control the world coffee market refused to be interviewed for the film, that doesn’t excuse the filmmakers from trying to find out just where along the line all the profits are going. They heap scorn on Starbucks and consumers of high-end coffee, who are hardly the culprits (it’s fair to say that most people who are familiar with the existence of fair trade coffees probably learned about them from Starbucks). Their film makes the point that the situation is unconscionable, and that alleviation is sensible to even the most rabid freemarketer (a one percent increase in African trade would pay for the amount of aid the continent receives five times over). But in the end Black Gold barely scratches the surface of a subject that could have yielded a rich vein of understanding about the inequities of “free trade.”