Wake up and Smell the Coffee

In case you haven't heard, our church will be hosting a screening of the documentary film "Black Gold: Wake up and Smell the Coffee" which looks into the multi-billion dollar coffee industry and shows the plight of poor Ethiopian farmers who grow the beans, but see little of the profits. Hopefully this documentary will become a great vehicle to entertain, inform, and ultimately motivate us, as consumers, on how we can directly empower poor coffee farmers to elevate themselves out of extreme poverty.

Incidentally, we have a couple of Starbucks employees who frequent Journey. So I decided to check out the Starbucks website and I found that they should be commended for their many social, environmental, and economic practices.

I also came across a Starbucks quicktime movie promoting its positive Ethiopian initiatives. From what I can tell, the improvements Starbucks made in infrastructure and methods (except for a $75,000 water well installed by the Brits) are basically just direct *business* investments with the intention of improving the quality of their product in Ethiopia. Which is not a bad thing necessarily, but it is just something that any ordinary company would do in a commodity oligopsony. By all rights, Starbucks is a very small buyer anyway--they only buy about 2% of their coffee from Ethiopia, but somehow they have come to the forefront of this issue. Starbucks happens to be a very large coffee retailer so their brand is shown in the movie, but I don't think that they are or should be villanized.

What do Ethiopian coffee farmers have to do with Journey anyway? Well, I believe that reacting to this issue embodies our value of "social justice." To me, social justice means that we must somehow seek to do what Jesus did--which was to go into the world healing AND empowering the marginalized. Jesus gave more than just gifts of miracles, he also gave an affirmation of value to those considered valueless by society such as the samaritan, the prostitute and the tax collector.

There are a lot of us at Journey who have social justice causes that we are passionate about. And unfortunately, the world has limitless cases of injustice! It's not just coffee farmers and it is not just Ethiopia that feel the pinch of imperfect markets. But so far, the only way to circumvent the exploitation of these extremely poor farmers is to inform the consumer of the importance of an available fair trade alternative. What better way to make a difference in the world by doing something we already love to do anyway: drinking coffee!

-John


http://www.blackgoldmovie.com/
http://www.oxfamamerica.org/blackgold
http://www.oligopolywatch.com/2003/09/05.html