The Coffee Beans By Guatemala / Central America And Distributed By The Company Of Starbucks

Continuous war in combination with rampant drug trafficking has caused the coffee industry in Colombia to struggle for many years, though Colombia’s long history with coffee predates that struggle. The coffee plant first reached Colombia sometime in the late 1700s (Encyclopedia of World Trade: From Ancient Times to the Present) and Colombia entered the coffee trade in the 1830s (Wikipedia, Coffee Production in Colombia). The geography of Colombia lends itself well to coffee production. Located in southern South America, Colombia is home to the Andes Mountains, which provides an optimal altitude for coffee (and coca) to grow. The Andes have three sets of mountain ranges, the Western Cordillera, the Central Cordillera, and the Eastern Cordillera. The majority of the coffee plantations in Colombia are on the western side of the Eastern Cordillera (Philip’s World Factbook 2008-2009).

Almost everyone drinks coffee. Most people view it as part of their basic needs. It is normally the first to be consumed whenever a day starts. It is commonly believed that a cup of coffee makes someone brighter and so able to perform his or her duties actively. This is therefore my chosen product. The following sections describes the path the product takes from the producer to reach me as well as to another consumer in another country which will be Brazil in this case.

Costa Rica now provided raw material for Starbucks which accounted for about 15 percent of the total coffee beans Starbucks needed every year. Costa Rica as one of the raw material suppliers plays an important role in global value chain. Coffee has played a pivotal role in the development of Costa Rica. It has shaped social, cultural and political institutions and is still one of country’s major agricultural exports. (Anywhere, 2016) The global value chain in this coffee industry can be described that Starbucks, the centre in this coffee global value chain, purchasing raw materials (coffee beans) from coffee farms in Costa Rica, reprocessing and reproducing in retail shops, selling the finished products (various kinds of coffee) to customers in the world.

The caffeine in coffee become an ethical increase over alcohol and have become a fashionable social beverage. It was interesting to see how it started off as this very exotic drink only for the upper class and then turned into what it is now. Coffee is a very fashionable drink that does not cost much that many have led their days with in today’s society.

Coffee is a beverage that is globally consumed, but also a product that has different values in different parts of the world. The role coffee plays in society differs around the world, from the farmers who grew the crops to the people who constantly consume them. Social theoretical perspectives are capable of showing the different roles coffee has in different societies. Symbolic interactionism, functionalism, and Marxism are three theories which show coffee’s role sociologically. These theories show how coffee affects people physically, how it affects them emotionally, how it leads them to have interactions, how it connects different parts of society, and how it’s economically controlled by a select few.

People around the world consume numerous goods every day. There are several things that determine what quantities and how frequently they are consumed and those influences can either work in tandem or act individually to influence a person. It is these foundations that set an average for what consumers will purchase and the volume of goods to be created by agriculturalists and industrialists. This is known as economic consumption patterns, and these patterns are carefully studied by economists. With the data that they glean from this assessment economists can then use that information to provide the economy with data

The documentary Black Gold, is about the world coffee market and an Ethiopian fair trade cooperative. Ethiopia being the birthplace of coffee is the largest producer of coffee in the world, producing some of the highest quality of coffee beans in the world, like Harar, Yuban and Sidamo types of coffee. The significant problems pointed out in this documentary show what is wrong in the global trading system. Mainly, while most of us continue have our lattes and specialty coffees, the amount paid to the Ethiopian coffee farmers is so low that a lot of them have been forced to chop down some of their coffee fields and rely on other crops to help them survive. The Ethiopian people are malnourished; they have no clean water, no healthcare, and no schools for their families. As quoted in the film, “They are living hand to mouth”.

Together, coffee and cattle account for most of the deforestation of the Atlantic Forest and Amazon. Deforestation for agriculture and cattle, urbanization, human population growth, have resulted

According to the Oxford dictionary, commodity is any raw material that can be bought and sold for economic means. That said, sugar and coffee are all commodities, because they can be sold and bought for a monetary value. The problem with this description however is that by simplifying the word commodity into a material gain or based on money, it’s undermining the value of the material like its cultural worth and origin. Therefore, this is reason why when we buy sugar, we see it based on its tastiness or its financial worth, but rarely as a material that can cause social ,cultural and even historically difference; which is why the book “Sweetness and power” is important in revealing the relational and historical fact about sugar.

He brought coffee seeds to Martinique in the Caribbean back in 1720. These seed grew and expanded until there were close to 18,680 coffee trees. The fast reproduction of coffee allowed it to quickly spread among South and Central America. The first places where it was spread to be Haiti and Mexico. The production of coffee in South America grew really fast. Especially in Haiti and the Dominican Republic where by 1788 supplied half the world’s coffee. Coffee played a major role in the geography of Latin America. This plantations, however, relied on African slaves. The horrible conditions that these slaves worked in was one of the most influential factors leading to the Haitian Revolution (UK Essays). After this revolution the coffee’s productivity never fully

Renton tells us about the connection between climate change and coffee. There is a threat to livelihoods for coffee farmers. the background is that about 2 million people work as coffee farmers in Central America, and about another 750,000 people directly or otherwise livelihoods depend on coffee. Coffee farmers are already relatively poor and rely on coffee for economic development. They are dealing with is a fungal disease that grows on coffee. This specific fungus doesn’t thrive in conditions lower than -10 degrees Celsius, but increasing temperatures driven by emission of greenhouse gases has allowed this fungus to cripple the coffee farmers. The fungus alone has decreased the coffee yield by 30%. It is a direct threat to the livelihoods of coffee farmers who rely on the industry to support their families. According to farmers, this fungus starting appearing a couple years ago as temperatures increased. There hasn’t been much done to address this concern from what I got out of the article. Even an increase of 2 to 2.5 degrees Celsius would lower coffee production even more. This a further example of how people in the Global South are impacted more immediately and negatively by human-driven climate change, while contributing the least to total

Finally, global economic issues have an immense influence on the world of coffee. Throughout history there has been a pattern that coffee producing countries are economically worse off than those that are consuming the coffee. Pendergrast mentions that “in 1950 the average income in consuming countries was three times that of coffee-growing nations. By the late 1960s it was five times great” (270). With that said, many producing coffee countries were facing endemics and malnourished peoples because workers were receiving absurdly low wages thus placing them into poverty and human suffering (271). Specifically, although 90 percent of El Salvador’s exports consisted of coffee in the 1930s, they agonized from “‘low wages, incredible filth…[under] conditions in fact not far removed from slavery’” (168). Global economic issues of these producing countries lead to dictators easily gaining power such as those in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras (170). Not only was politics a matter that resulted from global economic issues, “the high interest rates from financial institutions and price [squeezes]” lead to the economic struggle of farmers like those from Colombia due to

Over the course of time, there has been numerous amounts of goods introduced to the global market have acted as a lens in which societal changes can be observed through. By reviewing a society’s most demanded commodities and goods at a given time, one can acquire further insight into certain cultural aspects and values those societies may have held. Coffee is one such good that can provide such an insight into the social status and values of a time period. Further understanding of how coffee has played a role in social aspects of consumer countries, as well as portraying the social environment of such countries, can be gained when looking deeper into the history surrounding coffee and its development into society. “Culture infuses coffee with social and symbolic meanings” (Tucker 6), and in specific cases this connection between coffee and a consumer countries’ social atmosphere can indeed represent the culture.

Seeing someone holding a cup of coffee on the street is not unusual at all nowadays. In fact, they are starting to get more common. There are now different varieties to choose from. Shops or cafes also provide a lot of different choices or products to consumers. Prices could range from low to high, depending on what type of coffee beans you have chosen to make the coffee. By adopting the sociological imagination to coffee, it gives us a better understanding of what coffee represents in a social context. Based on the definition by Mills, [the sociological imagination can be defined as] the ability to understand the dynamic relationship between individual lives and the larger society (Ravelli, Bruce and Michelle Webber, 2016). This is basically where individuals have to think outside the box. In this case, we have to think specifically for the object, coffee. For instance, how does it perform its function in the society?

The film highlights the fact that coffee is the most valued word commodity, second to oil. The beginning of the film shows the process in which coffee is made- from bean harvesting by workers in Ethiopia who make next to nothing, through several intermediated stages, and into the market. Although we spend countless amounts of money on coffee without thinking twice, the price that coffee farmers who produce this commodity are getting paid, is disgustingly low. Some of them have even been forced to walk away from their fields. There is no better place to see this