Coffee Production
& Consumption
- It’s simple: Drink Coffee = Do things faster with more energy.
- Coffee is a brewed beverage with a strong flavour prepared from the roasted seeds of the ‘coffea’ plant. The beans are found in coffee ‘cherries’, which grow on trees cultivated in over 70 countries; primarily in equatorial Latin America, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa.
- Coffee is the leading source of caffeine consumption in the US, and is the world’s second most popular drink after water.
- On average, coffee drinkers will spend $164.71 per year on coffee.
- Today, US coffee drinkers consume approximately 3.1 cups per day on average and 52% of Americans over the age of 18 drink coffee every morning. On top of that, 30% of the population drinks coffee occasionally, meaning that over 80% of Americans consume.
- The sheer popularity of coffee and the profitability of the coffee industry are almost unfathomable in its size and scale. The coffee industry is a 10 billion dollar industry that has fostered trade between desperate countries since the colonial era.
Modern Day Slavery
- 27 million people are slaves worldwide, more than at any other time in the world; and 8.4 million are child.
- Types of slavery include: bonded labour, sex trafficking, forced labour, factories exploitation, slavery by descent and in some cases, forced.
- According to the International Labour Organisation, 250 million children are at work, and 120 million of these children work full time in slave or bonded labour.
- The worst offenders of these enslaved children are the cocoa (chocolate) and coffee industries – with 70% of the world’s coffee being harvested by enslaved.
- They have to endure long hours, low pay, poor living conditions; and have no of escaping because there’s no other work and are exploited.
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Sources - http://www.professorshouse.com/Food-Beverage/Beverages/Hot-Drinks/Articles/Coffee-Facts- and-Statistics/
Wow this is actually very interesting. I would guess that most people had no idea about all these facts before reading this. Who would have thought that the "civilised" world we live in today could contain so much slavery.
ReplyDeleteWhile i must admit, I will probably still drink coffee like I do, this does make me want to help out more with the cause. I feel like there must be more we can do than stop drinking coffee, because we know that wont happen.
Coffee is a huge multi billion dollar business as you mentioned, so we should really consider a proposal or an idea that could help make the production and making of coffee beans to be more fair. I guess it would be hard for us as a few people with a cause but change begets change and this has to start from somewhere.
We would obviously need the whole world to be on board. The first thing we need to do is get more people aware of this horrifying truth, the coffee you drink comes with a side of slavery, this can't be a normal part of our world today.
I think we all need to do our parts to change this.
Bavly you make some very valid points; however, in my opinion, you cannot 'still drink coffee' like you do while agreeing with the 'horrifying' truth behind the coffee's sources. You need to do your part to change this which is to take a stand and commit to only drinking fair-trade coffee. As I mentioned before, we are supporting 'Free the Slaves' who are doing a monumental amount of work worldwide with multiple governments and the US to try and abolish slavery.
ReplyDelete