Anger over a cup of coffee

It was raining very heavily outside my office building at the time I was about to leave for home. There was no way for me to get to my car parked in an open space parking a few blocks away without getting myself soaking wet. Without an umbrella, I’d have to wait until the downpour stopped. I made my way down to the shopping mall attached to the building, found a seat at a western-style coffee shop, ordered two doughnuts and a cup of latte while hoping for the rain to stop. I paid 12 ringgit and 50 cents for the snack and quickly settled in a comfy cushion seat to enjoy the expensive drink.

As I was sipping the cocktail of milk and ground coffee, I wondered how much of the money I just paid actually got to the poor farmers of Colombia, Brazil or Ethiopia. According to the BBC, there are as many as 25 million small-scale coffee farmers producing coffee around the world. The market for take-away coffee has trebled from USD30bn to USD90bn over the past decade, and shows no sign of slowing down. In the US alone, it increased 10% last year, when compared with 2005. In recent years however, coffee price hit a 30-year low.

It is estimated that the coffee shops can get 80 cups of coffee for every kilo of coffee beans, each cup can cost up to USD6 in Europe while farmers in developing countries are paid around USD2 per kilo. Some coffee farmers in Ethiopia are earning less than USD1 a day. And it did not make sense that I just paid about USD2 for a cup of coffee when the farmers there had to do 2 days of hard labour to earn the same money.

The Starbucks Coffee company, one of the biggest coffee chains in the world, opens a new Starbucks Coffee shop somewhere in the world every four hours. The company denies any practice of unfair trade and its website speaks proudly of its record of Corporate Social Responsibility. But behind the huge image building PR through the media, lie some less rosy pictures. In 2006, Starbucks was accused of trying to block Ethiopia’s move to trademark three of its homegrown premium coffee in the US. I imagined how powerful a global corporation like Starbucks could be if it could even take on a Third World government to ensure its maximum profitability. What chance do the coffee farmers have of getting fair deal from their hard labour? It sounds scary when you think about that and imagine how vulnerable our government position would be in the face of fierce negotiation for a bi-lateral Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the government of the most powerful economy in the world.

By the time I emptied my cup, there was so much anger that I felt I needed another cup of coffee to drain out the feeling. The sweet taste of the doughnuts calmed me down. I finished the last bits of the honey coated crumbs and stepped out to check the rain. I saw the mamak stall across the street and thought to myself I should have gone into that shop instead. The coffee would be cheaper and I would not have fed myself with so much anger.

1 Muharam 1429.