Life after Black Gold: Tadesse Meskela’s journey continues
February 28th, 2008 by admin
It’s a cold February day at the UN headquarters in New York and Tadesse has just flown in from Ethiopia to attend an expert panel on the role of cooperatives in reducing poverty. He’s been invited to speak after the UN secretariat saw Black Gold.
To an audience of country delegates, academics and UN experts Tadesse gave a passionate and proud presentation highlighting the remarkable achievements of his Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union.
In only nine years his producer organization has grown from 34 to 130 cooperatives, with a total of 130,000 individual members.
Tadesse is pleased about the growing success of his co-operative. He said, “Thanks to initiatives like Black Gold which continues to raise awareness and demand for good quality Ethiopian coffee we have been able to more than triple the amount of money we pay back to the farmers pockets. Two years ago we were selling our coffee at the Fairtrade minimum price of $1.45/lb. Today our coffee sells for a minimum of $2.30/lb, partly thanks to consumers asking their shops and cafes about how they can buy the coffee they saw in Black Gold”.
Of the $1.5 million that the cooperative earned last year, Tadesse plowed more than half back to the farmers in the form of dividends. In addition to the increased income from extra earnings from Fairtrade coffee sold by the 28 cooperatives in Tadesse’s union there has also been impressive social investments.
In addition to a school famously built by kind donations from Black Gold audience members, the Fairtrade system has resulted in five new schools and considerable upgrades of another six. Four health clinics have been built and 36 clean water projects have been completed benefiting thousands of coffee farmers’ families.
Tadesse also says he’s witnessing a slow change in the attitudes of the big coffee companies, “Coffee prices are still too low but the companies are slowly changing. They’ve started investing in social services for the farmers which is a good first step. But our hope is that they will pay us more so farmers can live decent lives from the fruit of their own labour. In Black Gold I said that we needed $10/lb – that’s still our aim”.
Every buyer, seller, roaster, politician or journalist that visit Tadesse’s offices in Addis Ababa are sure to get a copy of the Black Gold DVD before they leave. Now he’s looking forward to the official Ethiopian premiere of the film which is finally scheduled for 21st March: “Ethiopian farmers need to see this film to feel proud of the quality product they produce and to realize the power of working together in cooperatives” Tadesse said as he left New York for another few weeks traveling around the US to spread the word about his coffee.
