I watched this movie called Black Gold, which is about the coffee market. I actually dislike coffee, so watching all these people drink coffee made me want to throw up, but I thought that the ideas of the film (how free trade fails to provide adequate income for so many farmers, how unnecessary aide would be if there were fair prices, the ignorance of so many about what they consume) were all really good points.I really liked learning about the film's main character, a man who represented a coffee growers union in Ethiopia who was trying to get a higher price for their coffee. I thought the movie did a good job of showing what was possible if certain forces worked. It was so hard to see the opposite of this, where they had to set up nutrition stations, which determine which children get food aid to prevent malnourishment. (They turned away children who were only kind of sickly because they wanted to try to help the desperately bad.) Also heartbreaking and sad was the tour of Pike's Place Starbucks (where two young baristas discussed Starbuck's success) and a barista championship (where a Canadian contestant came off as a total tool.)
I would have liked a little more information about chat, a narcotic that many coffee growers turn to because they are so desperate to feed their families, and about how food aid operates. The film also randomly flits back through time near the end of the movie, which was confusing. But, overall, it is a well-written film that does a good job of explaining how free trade works, who benefits, and what the alternatives are.
