The International Coffee Crisis Of India

I watched the video “The Coffee Go-Round” which talks about how the cost of coffee seems to be dropping and as a result this has a negative impact on coffee producing countries. One of the strategies mentioned in the video is to grow different crops, this strategy isn’t so great since many of these farmers don’t have enough money to grow different crops. Another strategy mentioned is to move out of the land and go into the city, this is a good and bad option. It’s a good option since in cities there are more jobs being offered. However, it’s not such a great option because many of these farmers have lived their whole lives on their land, and moving to the city is a drastic change especially if they have a family. Lastly, another option is fair

Poverty, child labour, low wages, long working hours, no employments benefits and illiteracy caused by coffee industries in coffee growing communities due to increased demand of coffee farmer’s children are involved to do work hard with their parents to earn more and also remain illiterate.

1. Coffee growers in poor rural areas are paid very little for their crop. What strategies are proposed in this clip for changing that situation?

This is a system aimed at encouraging farmers not to give up on coffee planting by providing a better and stable life for small scale farmers who were also initially dependent on the income from coffee plantations (Mendez et al., 241; Bacon, Mendez, Gomez, Stuart, and Flores 263). In as much as globalization is a significant and inevitable move towards development, it has caused an increase in the gap between the farmer and the consumer in relation to the consumption of coffee. The small scale farmers in Central America are now left to compete with other coffee producers from regions such as East Africa and this leads to low prices of the product (Sick 194). This has been a source of discouragement for small scale farmers. In as much as the government has taken initiatives such as the introduction of Fair Trade, it seems like the statistics of this system being successful are still at an all time

In the United States of America, people take food for granted. Anyone can go to the local grocery store or a farmers market and buy almost every type of food produced in the world. Globalization of food in first world countries has created “food scenes” in large metropolitan areas, and we can agree that this is spreading to smaller towns every day. Anyone can think of their favorite food and everyone would give a different response, whether it would be Mexican, Italian, or a local cuisine. This is possible through technological advances in farming techniques developed to produce food year round, due to strong states of government, with policies that empower this to be true. The lack of government involvement in Malawian farms is the predominant reason for a constant state of poverty.

Coffee is “a major cash crop of Chagga farmers” (p. xi) and a large portion of the economic profit, but what happens when drought and coffee berry disease hit the Chagga society. Environmental problems such as these became a large problem facing many people of the Chagga. Much of the rich farm land on Mt. Kilimanjaro inhabited coffee trees and therefore leaving less space for individual gardens. When coffee berry disease and drought affected the production of Tanzania’s major export, people such as the Chagga were left with a food shortage, therefore introducing another environmental problem: famine. Although families could maintain home gardens with the small amount of land available, it rarely was enough to satisfy the whole family. Yet Chagga farmers were not permitted to convert coffee farming land into land for personal farming. Another large cause of sickness came from the bacteria ridden water. Women did not boil the water upon giving it to their young. A lot of people have heard “don’t drink the water in Mexico”. Well this was a similar situation

These factors contributed to economic, social and natural bases degradation of the country (pg 1).” According to authors McDaniel, Byrne and Byrne, Nicaragua is one of the poorest countries where the people make a living by fishing and agriculture. However, “Agriculture plays a significant role in the country’s economy accounting for 21.5% of value added GDP and employs nearly 47% of the country’s population (10). Also not only climate change threatens agriculture, but negatively impacts rural households (11). Many About Nicaragua’s economy, Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) reports that the country is one the “poorest” countries of Central America. Coffee beans are mainly Central America’s backbone of the Central Americans. For Nicaragua, it brings “fifth to a quarter of export revenues.” However due to climate change, it can worse affect coffee growing due to its sensitivity that can cause a heavy economic loss. In order for the country to adapt to this climate change, the government launched a National Adaptation Plan that will help coffee farmers adapt to climate change and to “diversify coffee based incomes. Also, CCAFS reports that the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) provided $24 million to assist the coffee farmers by providing technology to help poor famers adapt, improve, and increase incentives for

Life is rough for millions of poor food producers, the current economic crisis especially makes the industry extremely tough for them. The rise and fall in demand and prices can mean the difference between eating a nice meal or going a day with nothing to eat. Women are worst affected by this as they are often employed casually and with low wages. Commonly the first to be let go when times get tough. Support for these communities include getting farmers a fair price and campaigning against global trade rules that keep people in

Sometimes they only pack one tortilla for lunch because that’s all they can afford. One of the men in the film took ten years to pay back the loan he received to purchase the land. Guatemala farmers work really hard and sometimes, they are paid whatever the buyer wants to give them for it. Their children has to work after school to help out, they live in poverty, and they don’t rest until the end of the work day at 10 or 11 at night. I never knew that buying one cup of coffee has this effect on the farmers. This is common with globalization because, “for instance, multinational corporations sometimes continue to invest only enough in poorer countries to efficiently extract the resources they produce or to benefit from the low costs of labor obtained there” (Chapter 10.5, para. 5).

A commodity is a raw material or primary agricultural product that can be bought and sold. The market treats it as equipment or nearly so with no regard to who produced it. The original producer does not make the “big” money from the good that has become a commodity demanded by consumers. A commodity’s supply and demand is part of one universal market like corn, or wheat. A stereo is something that would not be considered a commodity. Other things are important about a stereo not that it is just a stereo but what brand and quality is in consideration when purchasing a stereo. Demand for one type might be much larger than the demand for another. This is not the case with commodities; they lose differentiation across their supply base. An

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

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”.

Fair Trade Coffee Fair Trade promotes socially and environmentally sustainable techniques and long-term relationships between producers, traders and consumers The world coffee industry is in crisis. A flood of cheap, lower-quality coffee beans have pushed world market prices down to

The “Coffee Wars – The Big Three: Starbucks, McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts” article focuses on the company analysis of the Starbucks brand and how its main competitors, McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts, has affected their brand and driven competition higher. Even though there are many companies trying to enter the specialty coffee market, these three companies own the majority of the market share. With Starbucks’ top quality and above average prices they hold a different market than the fast coffee/food market of Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks; yet the competitive moves Dunkin’ Donuts has made over the years in order to compete with Starbucks and surpass McDonald’s has driven competition up between all three companies. The competition has stiffened ever more in the past ten years due to the changing economy. This led to “the big three” to come up with different techniques to gain competitive advantage over the other. Although the competition between these companies is to gain most of the market share, consumers are still loyal to a certain brand; this makes it difficult to gain each other’s clientele. McDonald’s continues to appeal to customers who want value and speed, Dunkin’ Donuts focuses on the middle-class, while Starbucks a customer who desires a higher quality product along with being recognized for using the brand.

India, like many other Asian countries, has a tea drinking culture, but the coffee market is catching up and growing fast. This case talked about the stories of Café Coffee Day (CCD), the Indian coffee industry market leader, along with its competitor Starbucks from USA. CCD was founded in 1996 and by April 2013 it had around 3,000 stores within the Indian market. CCD had not faced any severe threat up till 2012 when Starbucks made its entry into the Indian market through a joint venture with Tata. As the world’s largest coffee chain company, Starbucks wanted to get a slice of the cake. In 2013, it opened 11 stores in Delhi and Mumbai.