An Unsustainable Coffee Culture
How my daily morning routine of buying a caramel macchiato isn’t helping anyone but big corporations.
As I wait for my Starbuck’s drink I cannot help but think of how I am contributing to market capitalism by continuing the cycle in consumerism. This cycle of exploitation continues as I keep big corporations like Starbucks in business. The idea of ‘consumer freedom’ guides us into thinking we have control of our choices in the market economy. This in fact is false, the market economy is highly run by large corporations that make us believe we have options but in reality, the choices we have, have already been decided by what creates the highest revenue in the market. What powers these large coffee corporations to continue the demand for coffee is ultimately us the consumers. Buying coffee as my morning daily routine sounds so insignificant, but in reality, it continues the market capitalism process by increasing the demand for coffee.
How has an essential commodity like coffee become a tool for destructive market capitalism? As consumers, we tend to forget where are food comes from. The coffee industry has done a good job of exploiting the market economy and neglecting the sustenance economy. The harsh reality of it all is, coffee is becoming such a globalized commodity that the effects of this market capitalism is being demonstrated in Third World countries. As mentioned in Raj Patel’s Stuff and Starved many poor coffee farmers in Third World countries are struggling to make ends meet when all their energy and resources go into the cultivation of coffee beans. Large corporations like Nestle and Starbucks are at fault for dominating this industry unfairly. Farmers are paid little to nothing, and are forced to live in debt, live off of their savings, rent land, and sometimes resort to suicide due to all the stress. It is an unfair game to play, but unfortunately it governs our market economy.
As mentioned in Vandana Shiva’s Living Economies chapter “especially in the context of Third World countries, nature’s need for resources gets ignored. So too are the requirements of the sustenance economy that provides for the biological survival of the marginalized poor and the reproduction of society.” Coffee cultivation creates this inequality because farmers in Third World countries are not able to provide their families with enough revenue to buy food due to their land and resources going towards the coffee cultivation. Corporations are the ones benefitting from this unequal distribution, they are not willing to hand down ‘their control over the coffee industry’. This industry becomes a type of enslavement that poor farmers are forced to work under. Regulations like the ones in the WTO strengthen corporations by giving them legal rights to continue this unequal relationship.
After giving much thought to this issue, I began to realize how unaware I am as a consumer in the U.S of the harsh inequalities that exist due to the high demand for coffee. It does not seem like a big deal to pay for a five-dollar coffee here in the U.S., if anything a ‘hipster’ culture has arisen where local coffee shops serve as a social culture. On the other hand, people are suffering to sell their hard work for a few cents. The higher up coffee goes in the food system the higher the value. The system is set in favor of the large corporations, resulting in poor farmers getting the end of the stick. As consumers, we are able to have an impact on the high demand by consuming less. This ends the high consumerism but does not end the inequality reciprocated to poor farmers in Third World countries.
For this inequality to cease there would need to be a change in the food system and the way we could help the situation would be to bring an end to the consumerism. If companies hear us voice our opinion we could possibly sway them into distributing the profit equally to its producing farmers. Farmers are seen as disposable to these corporations and the ultimate power is handed to them in the form of trade laws and regulations. This injustice is not brought to the attention of the consumers; therefore, many consumers are clueless as to what happens behind the scenes of the food industry. It is easy to become detached from this issue and say, “this issue isn’t affecting me directly” but this is not the case. This issue may be evidently present in the global South but it affects us consumers as well. We are fooled into thinking we have a variety of options to choose from but what we are not told is that those options are curtailed by the large corporations in accordance to what they find will yield the highest profit. This industry is not in it for the poor farmers in the global South, or the consumers who bring in the revenue. These corporations are in it for the financial gain.