Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

Good morning. Ready for another day? If not, perhaps you’ve not yet had your first shot of caffeine, the one that ignites the morning for many of us… …wakes us up, then fires us up. Cappucino. Espresso. Latte. Coffee has become some kind of sacred drink, the drug of choice for millions of us. Every day three new coffee shops open in the UK. In ten years time, it’s estimated they’ll outnumber pubs. Ever since Sufi mystics, in the C15th, discovered coffee could keep you awake during extended hours of prayer, coffee’s special ability to improve our concentration and performance has made it our legal high. But a Â鶹Éç report this week finds this relentless rise is at risk. Coffee prices recently fell to their lowest in a decade, after surplus production in Brazil - the world’s largest producer - led to millions of kilos flooding the market. Eighty per cent of all coffee is produced by 25million smallholders and, as prices collapsed, some farmers have been forced to abandon plantations as their tiny profit margins disappear. A farmer in Nicaragua or Honduras may receive only two percent of the price we pay in a coffee shop - and when that’s no longer enough to meet school fees or healthcare for your kids, it’s time to find another job. Or another country. A place where life is sustainable. Paying a little more for coffee which guarantees growers a decent price is one way to respond. But coffee trading corporations need to wise up too. If farmers abandon plantations, says José Sette, of the International Coffee Organization then ‘we might not have sufficient coffee in the future.’ Trace our families back a few centuries and most of us descend from smallholders - their everyday lives, pulling from the good earth, the food to keep a family alive. Harvest time was always precarious which explains that famous line in that famous prayer of Jesus: ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ But today, especially in the big cities, we are distanced from the seedtime and the harvest, we don’t notice how the earth brings forth our food. Sixty years ago Martin Luther King used to say that by the time we’ve eaten our breakfast, we’ve depended ‘on half the world’. Today it’s more than half the world, but we remain largely heedless of the journey our food - and other essentials – makes to reach us. While few of us now say grace before meals, simply pausing - before we eat or drink - to acknowledge those invisible people, across our world and our country, who have grown our food, is one way of noticing the ties that bind us. To the good earth and to each other. A quiet recognition of those who have given us this day our daily coffee…