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Nov 9, 2018 · A Speakit Films Production. Find Out More. Multinational coffee companies now rule our shopping malls and supermarkets and dominate the industry worth over $80 billion, making coffee the most valuable trading commodity in the world after oil.
The Story. Multinational coffee companies now rule our shopping malls and supermarkets and dominate the industry worth over $80 billion, making coffee the most valuable trading commodity in the world after oil.
WHY BLACK GOLD? We were provoked to make a film about coffee after it was announced at the end of 2002 that Ethiopia was facing another famine. Twenty years earlier in 1984, people across the world had been motivated to respond to this crisis by giving aid.
Nick and Marc Francis (Co-directors/producers of BLACK GOLD) answer the questions that audiences from around the world have been asking ever since their world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.
BLACK GOLD's cinematic, broadcast, and media success is only one part of the film's ongoing impact. Since the release, Tadesse Meskela's coffee has increased in price from $1.45/lb to a minimum of $2.30/lb, and his Union has tripled the amount of money being paid back to 130,000 farmers.
Making coffee production more sustainable, like Tadesse Meskela's co-operative is attempting to do, would grant small-scale family farmers, who produce 75 percent of the world's coffee supply, a living wage. When coffee prices fall, the economic and social effects are profound.
Tadesse Meskela is one man on a mission to save his 74,000 struggling coffee farmers from bankruptcy. As his farmers strive to harvest some of the highest quality coffee beans on the international market, Tadesse travels the world in an attempt to find buyers willing to pay a fair price.
Since Black Gold was completed the entire "Doha Development Round" which was supposed to put developing countries at the centre of world trade talks has collapsed and is unlikely to be restarted. A system of trade that is rigged in favour of rich countries still continues.
Remarkable - A moving but scandalous story. Black Gold has extraordinary power. .... (and) evokes an emotional response while trading in intriguing, complex, real-world issues…..This is entertainingly told, and instructive about how little we in the West consider how our coffee reaches us.
As westerners revel in designer lattes and cappuccinos, impoverished Ethiopian coffee growers suffer the bitter taste of injustice. In this eye-opening expose of the multi-billion dollar industry, Black Gold traces one man's fight for a fair price.
