The last initiative from Kuterevo volunteers is called Topic of the week. Each week is dedicated to a topic with the purpose to learn more about the topic and to make Postaja more educational for volunteers. Last week was dedicated to coffee. To celebrate it, the volunteers drank organic coffee and prepared a tasteful tiramisu together (containing organic coffee as well). Usually it takes half an hour to prepare it, but we spent one hour on the preparations and then we waited 3 hours while the tiramisu was in the fridge. To eat it we were faster and we only spent a few minutes. You can find a recipe for tiramisu here: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/tiramisu-ii/. If it is possible, you can use organic and/or fair trade ingredients!

But we also did something more serious; we watched the documentary called ‘Black Gold’. Have you ever thought about how important coffee is in the world? Each day billions of cups of coffee are prepared in the whole world. However, most people don´t know where it comes from.

Before 1989, the International Coffee Organization (ICO) regulated the international coffee market and stabilized the prices. After that, ICO deregulated the market of coffee, allowing a few multinationals to “play” with prices, which resulted in the prices for raw coffee falling to minimum levels. The price of a cup of coffee in a café in Western Europe is around 2.5 Euros, while the coffee farmers get less than this amount of money for a whole kilo of raw coffee. They are often forced to abandon their fields, and the economic sustainability of coffee producing countries is endangered. The ‘Black Gold’ documentary shows how Tadesse Meskela works to improve the lives of thousands of small coffee farmers in cooperatives in Ethiopia. He travels around the world to find buyers who pay a fair price for their coffee. Nevertheless, this is very hard, due to the pressure of multinationals to keep the price of coffee low. Coffee for which a ‘fair’ price is paid to the farmers can often be recognized by a ‘Fair Trade’ label. So, next time you buy coffee, think about whom you are buying it from! For more information you can visit http://blackgoldmovie.com.

Marco