Black Gold: Coffee Documentary

[brandondrury]

I watched an interesting documentary recently. It was focused around a dude who is employed to run a union of Euthiopian coffee bean farmers.

The bottom line: In this documentary, coffee been farmers were making $0.24 since kilo of beans. Starbucks brings in about $230 per kilo of beans.

Granted, you have to tranport the coffee beans, roast them, hire employees, etc. However, you can't tell me that it takes $200 to transport and roast a kilo of coffee beans.

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Me and my business partner buddy (my real job) are always looking for ways to make cash. Over the years, I've found repeated examples where (what I call), "Capitalism hasn't kicked in yet".

I just can't understand why no coffee companies haven't went in and undercut our current system. If the mark up is outstanding as the documentary implied, it should be easy for someone to go in and make a killing simply selling the coffee for 20% cheaper.

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I don't get too wound up about the "starving people in Africa" bit. I don't like it, but I refuse to get overly emotional about it. I usually think of people that look more like a tribe than a typical 2007 person.

The Euthiopian coffee farmers were 2007 people. They wore regular clothes. They weren't hunting lions or doing any other stereotype that Americans might think. They were just dudes who worked extremely hard who just want running water and schools for their kids. They said if they could get $0.35 per kilo instead of $0.24 per kilo, they could have running water and schools...which is all they want.

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So if the coffee farmers are starving, where is all the profit going from a $3 cup of coffee?

Why isn't a big coffee company rising that will pay $0.35 per kilo and come up with a better cup of coffee to sell for $2.50?

This was the first obvious, significant moment for me that my ideas of capitalism aren't being practiced in the real world.

Brandon