Wake up and Smell the Coffee
Times Online, UK - June 2, 2007
Watching Black Gold, a documentary about inequities in the global coffee market, you can’t help, albeit perversely, feeling a twinge of sympathy for Starbucks. It’s not even one of the big four, the über-corporations charged with bilking Third World farmers, but there it is, as ever, an emblem of sinister Amero-capitalism.
“We do not consider Black Gold an antiStarbucks film at all,” protests Marc Francis, who, along with his brother, Nick, made the 77-minute documentary that has been a hit at the Sundance and London film festivals. “It centres on the struggle of the coffee farmer, set against the backdrop of our consumer lifestyle. The problem is that the average person on the street can’t see Nestlé or Kraft – they’re not as in your face.”
Coffee drinking, at Starbucks or otherwise, is no idle diversion, it illustrates. It’s a business worth $80 billion a year, as coffee is now the second-biggest traded commodity after oil. “Coffee is such a cultural reference point,” adds Nick Francis. “That’s why, from the start, we realised this was going to be something big" ...