Waubonsee Community College

Victims of cheap coffee, produced by YLE - Finnish Broadcasting Co. ; directed by Pertti Pesonen

videorecording

For College; Adult audiences

Victims of cheap coffee

electronic resource

747799418

produced by YLE - Finnish Broadcasting Co. ; directed by Pertti Pesonen

51

Global business and economics in video

Collapsing prices on the world coffee market have thrown millions of growers around the world into poverty. The price farmers receive for coffee is at its lowest in over thirty years. Coffee plantation owners are bankrupt and the workers are starving. Filmed in Nicaragua and Vietnam, the film describes the human consequences that the collapse of coffee prices has caused in producer countries. Among the poorest countries in Latin America, Nicaragua is more dependent on coffee production than other South American countries. Rosa Maria Mendez buried her six-year-old son, who had died of starvation. "We have nothing left but to wait for death," she says as she looks after her five surviving children. Vietnam, one of the few remaining socialist countries, began to take steps toward a market economy in the 1990s. Advised by the IMF and the World Bank to focus on crops for export, they switched from rice to coffee. In ten years Vietnam became the second largest coffee producer, after Brazil, leading to an international oversupply. The price dropped and 700,000 coffee farmers of Vietnam were impoverished. Multinational companies have profited because coffee is so cheap. The crisis is worldwide: the International Coffee Organization says that the price crash has pushed over 25 million people into poverty as farmers who used to grow food now sell coffee

general