Coffee — one of the world’s favorite drinks, with consumption on the rise — is one of the most traded global commodities. But that doesn’t mean everyone is profiting: The United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization has observed “asymmetric income distribution among actors in the value chain” — a systemic issue that, unchecked, “can threaten the livelihood of millions of smallholder producers.” And as with any commodity product, the industrialization of coffee production has also taken a significant environmental toll.
As a product grown mostly in the Global South but consumed most heavily in the Global North, coffee today in some ways mirrors the colonial structures that made it a global commodity in the first place. It’s one of the reasons Bartholomew Jones got into the business. His company, Cxffeeblack, foregrounds the product’s African roots (the plant almost certainly originated in Ethiopia) and works exclusively with Black African producers and processors. “Coffee is a $400 billion industry globally,” says Jones. “And currently, according to the president of Uganda, less than one percent of that money goes to continental Africans.”
