Claire Goose's trip to Ethiopia
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Photo: Oxfam |
Many centuries ago, a goat herder from the Kaffa region of Ethiopia
noticed that when his animals ate the red berries growing on some
of the bushes they would become very lively and harder to control.
He told this story to a local monk who tasted the berries and
found that when he ate them he stopped being tired and was able
to stay up all night to write his manuscripts. This was how coffee
was first discovered, and Ethiopia became the birthplace of one
of the world's most popular drinks.
In 2002 Claire Goose travelled to Ethiopia as part of Oxfam's
Make Trade Fair campaign
to find out how falls in the price of coffee have affected the
many coffee farmers in the country.
Claire met with many coffee farmers who explained that they'd
had to take their children out of school, could no longer feed
them proper meals, and were living on a diet of only maize.
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Photo: Oxfam |
Twenty years ago farmers received around £230
per year for their coffee but now they are lucky to get under
£50. The price of the coffee we drink at home hasn't gone
down though, so someone somewhere is making a huge profit.
A coffee grower earns only around 6 pence for every
average jar of coffee. This means that millions of farmers are
facing hardship since so little of the money made from selling
coffee goes to the person that grew it.
It's not just in Ethiopia that farmers are having a tough time.
Closer to home in Wales, big multinational companies are also
making life difficult for the producers. Cool Planet's interactive
Milking
It! resource looks at the impact of international trade
on small farmers.
Oxfam aims to highlight these injustices and is calling
for the big coffee companies to pay a fairer price to farmers
so they can afford to buy enough food and send their children
to school.
They launched the Make Trade Fair
campaign to make big corporations and western governments take
responsibility to ensure small farmers worldwide survive and get
a better deal.
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