Posts by Vic Morgan

I posted my vote for you October 25, as one of more than a million Americans living abroad who voted in the Presidential election decided today in the early hours of the morning. Congratulations, we won! At my election party in Newcastle-upon-tyne, England, you had the united support of my British colleagues and my partner from Indiana, who also voted for you.

By any definition it was a record voter turnout, but an even bigger turnout could be counted at the parties and public gatherings like mine around the world, where the not-so-silent majority were rooting for you. True, you’ve won the vote of Americans, but the real landslide is that the world has voted for you. This is perhaps no more apparent than in the impoverished country of Kenya, where your relatives and supporters danced in the street to celebrate your victory – Kenya has even declared a national holiday in your honour.

People around the world feel you are part of them in some way be it a multiracial, multiethnic, or multinational dimension. Please make the most of the hopes and dreams of all of us who have voted for you and lead as President with the world’s collective interests in mind. For starters, America’s economy needs saving, but please don’t forget the critical need to expand Fair Trade with the poorest countries, including paying it forward to those same Kenyans who celebrate you. And you must challenge the world to end war, perhaps you could substitute a global green revolution in its place – I wouldn’t mind if we were all fighting for a more sustainable world.

Please do your best to make the dream a reality. We’re here to help.

Last October we moved into a big new warehouse in our home city of Newcastle upon Tyne. The move meant we could even afford to hire a cleaning company to keep our office and warehouse tidy and shiny – previously, I vacuumed and mopped the floors as part of living the committed life on an entrepreneur…

Unfortunately, the cleaning company brought with them a load of cleaning products with ingredients not of this world. It's taken a few months, but hallelujah, they're gone, done, toast, banished (humanely, of course). We certainly have enough stock of Bio-D and Ecover to keep us totally green and clean. Thanks for making it happen Ben, our Green Activist-Online Marketing Manager

P.S. just learned that John Travolta is reportedly a big Ecover supporter and global warming campaigner, though check out how many private planes make up the flip side of this story.

This movie documents a simply, unfair story – 2 billion cups of coffee are drunk every day in the £40 billion world coffee market, yet only a handful of powerful corporations including Kraft, Nestle, Proctor and Gamble, Sara Lee, and Starbucks continue to get rich in a coffee trade that exploits coffee growers who earn less than £1 per day.

British filmmakers Marc and Nic Francis follow the fate of a group of coffee growers from the Sidamo area of Ethiopia along with their co-operative, lead by Tadesse Meskela who campaigns for fair prices on their behalf.

The documentary shows how far apart the winners and losers are in the coffee trade, with the filmmakers contrasting images of consumers nonchalantly sipping lattes in cozy cafes vs. women picking coffee beans for endless hours for a salary smaller than the price of a single latte, then their children get turned away for malnutrition treatment because they’re not yet sick enough.

The filmmakers also point to signs of emerging solutions. The fair-trade movement led by Fairtrade Labelling Organisations has created a system for coffee farmers to earn fair prices, which has achieved strong support among consumers in the UK and Europe – hopefully this film will help awaken a market of support in the U.S.

Fairtrade has begun to help some farmers financially, but for millions, the hope for a better future is still a distant one – as evidenced in the film where the first Fairtrade payment earned by the cooperative wasn’t enough to build the school the farmers so wanted for their children.

As the film was not produced with the pace or narrative intensity of a Michael Moore film or of the acclaimed An Inconvenient Truth, it leaves the audience with ample opportunity to reflect in their own thoughts and emotions about potential answers to the Black Gold problem. In addition to putting our ethical purchasing power to work by drinking more fair trade coffee from fair trade organisations such as Cafédirect, Traidcraft, and Equal Exchange, how about helping coffee farmers constitute, finance and manage super-cooperatives? Then they’ll have the power to stand-up to the multinationals to accelerate and extend their rise from poverty.

The farmers of the developing world deserve more than just a better future.

78 minutes, UK/USA (2006)
www.blackgoldmovie.com

» Watch the trailer for Black Gold on YouTube