Thursday, Oct. 27, 7 p.m.
Beckman Auditorium, The Ames Library

Black Gold is a 2006 documentary about the global coffee trade.

Multinational coffee companies now dominate the industry worth over $80 billion, making coffee the most valuable trading commodity in the world after oil.

But while we continue to pay for our lattes and cappuccinos, the price paid to coffee farmers remains so low that many have been forced to abandon their coffee fields.

Nowhere is this paradox more evident than in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee. Tadesse Meskela, manager of a coffee farmers union, is one man on a mission to save his 74,000 struggling coffee farmers from bankruptcy. As the farmers strive to harvest some of the highest quality coffee beans on the international market, Tadesse travels the world in an attempt to find buyers willing to pay a fair price.