Island Life by David Slack

I saw the NZD250 (I guess) price tag for the iPhone. And then the NZD140 annual charge for MobileMe - which seems to be mostly functionality GMail has for free?

Does the "openness" of the iPhone allow Google, or opensource hackers, to create an alternative to MobileMe?

primary production, David?
who needs food, clothing and shelter?
nah, just live in a 24-hr mcDees. prob solved.

but really, what we need is everyone on the planet to emulate (self-identifying) middle class nz-ers or americans.

driving their suvs 80km/day and hanging out at st***ucks.
no need for fair trade beans then, eh?

The economics of coffee is a fascinating disaster. There is a terrible mix of factors:

1. It's very labour intensive to produce quality coffee, because the cherries ripen throughout the year, and require hand-picking to get the ripe ones. There is no mechanised way to do this that preserves quality.

2. Huge planting programmes of very low-grade, high-yield varieties in places like Vietnam and Brazil have swamped the market for years. These are owned and operated by large firms, and drive out the little guys.

3. Multinationals cream off a huge, huge profit margin they are loathe to give up.

4. In some places, eg Guatemala, coffee growing operates with virtual forced labour. Otherwise it wouldn't be economic to grow. (Just like cocoa and sugar cane).

Learning about coffee production in the last few months, as I've done more and more reading, has really taken some of the enjoyment out of drinking it. Every bean represents a lot of terrible labour done for a pittance, maybe under duress.

When you put all these things together, it's clear that if you want nice coffee at a price you can afford from a producer who volunteered to make it for you and gets a reasonable living from it, only cutting out the middle-men will do it - they screw down the rewards to the producers and the quality for the consumers.

Learning about coffee production in the last few months, as I've done more and more reading, has really taken some of the enjoyment out of drinking it.

There is a selection at the supermarket that do advertise their fair trade beans and what I do is support those. It seems only right. So get behind that! But, you then go into the sugar trade, and milk monopoly(although not as bad as it used to be) .........(sigh)

Black Gold

It's worth seeing for anyone interested in coffee and extreme economic exploitation. Will probably make you switch from Nescafe to Scarborough Fair.

primary production, David?
who needs food, clothing and shelter?

I don't deny the crucial role of primary production, but I feel pessimistic about prospects for the little guy. The documentary paints a picture of a Fairtrade model that proceeds on noble intentions, but seems beset by huge challenges.

"beset by huge challenges"

yes.
but as "rich world" consumers, we have a choice about what we buy and from whom.
how we exercise that choice does affect people at the other end of the production chain, even if we don't want to acknowlege the fact.
so, I think the "fair trade" movement is one legitimate response to this moral dilemma.

but really, the "little guy" angle is important for other, less obvious, reasons too.

like, the industrial agriculture model is doomed to end in tears, for a number of reasons:

-wrecked soil
-depleted water resources
-polluted rivers/lakes/seas
-expensive/scarce petroleum/natgas for machinery/agrichems
-narrowing of the crop gene pool increasing vulnerability to failure

just to name a few.

anyway, i think it is a good idea to have a mutually positive relationship with the people who are producing your food.

and i really don't think the big food multinationals care about much except their profits over the next 12 quarters or so. after that, all bets are off.

anyway, i think it is a good idea to have a mutually positive relationship with the people who are producing your food.

Yes, and if everyone does that.....it's gotta be a good thing.

Another reason why we might support fairtrade - small scale farming is more productive, and fairtrade usually targets small scale farmers. Yet more evidence that convinces me that we can do much better than "megadairy" in food production.

I think of it as being like free-range eggs. I bought them when they were very expensive indeed, as did a few other eccentrics. We were the market, we grew the market, the producers started to compete for our custom, and now there are a great many free range eggs that relatively are cheaper than they used to be.

It is true that in this way large concerns "segment" the market to capture the premium that soft-headed idiots like me are prepared to pay. On the other hand, things are better than they would otherwise be. And if animal welfare laws were tightened up so that only free-range eggs could be sold, the battery farmers wouldn't be able to claim that you can't make a living selling free-range eggs.

So it is with the fair-trade coffee. It doesn't need to take over the world, although that might well be a good thing. To the extent that it works at all, it does something good.

I noticed that People's Coffee in Newtown, who sell very good fair-trade coffee, also sell fair-trade sugar. I've been thinking about the case for switching to it. Sugar is also produced in appalling ways in many places. I believe Chelsea source most of theirs from Queensland, which hasn't had indentured labour since 1906...

thanks for the link to your namesake, George ;-)

i barely visit the Guardian Unlimited site anymore, unless someone points me to a specific article.

very topical indeed...

ditto for the Guardian article. I heard some squawking on natradio yesterday about the Greens' notion to diversify away from mega-dairy. So, when the commodity price drops and transport cost rockets and Chinese dairy industry booms, where will we be?

I've got this terrible vision of a land dotted with cows and windfarms and scored with rivers of milk and sludge.