Black Gold: coffee, a very tough business

This trailer puts forward the coffee business and its hardships on producers; To sum it up, for a 3$ cup of coffee, producers only earn 3 cents.
Let's make trade fair!

Use your loaf: food prices and the Arab uprising, by Dr Rami Zurayk

Published in The Observer, on 17th of July 2011:

"People in Arab countries have always relied on bread as a low-cost source of sustenance. In Yemen alone there are more than 20 different kinds of bread, each made and baked differently.

In Egypt, bread is known as aish, meaning "life". It is the inseparable companion of all dishes, even some desserts. The Fertile Crescent, stretching from the Egyptian Nile to the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates, is where agriculture began, where wheat, lentils, chickpeas, sheep and goats and olives were first cultivated.

Today, that same region is the largest importer of food in the world. [...] Although the Arab revolutions were united under the slogan "the people want to bring down the regime" not "the people want more bread", food was a catalyst."

Read the full article here.

Dr Rami Zurayk's blog Land and People.

Rami Zurayk is a professor of agricultural and food sciences at the American University of Beirut and author of Food, Farming and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring (Just World Books). Find it on amazon.

Small producers struggle to earn a fair price...

“In Lebanon, the price of wheat is protected by the government, as for the other crops, small farmers struggle to earn the right and fair price for their goods. Middle-men are the ones who collect the big margins, leaving out the real growers” – says M. Sleilati.

M. Sleilati has founded his family business 10 years ago in the region of Kob Elias. He has a few employees in his mill where he produces bulgur, and sells all types of local seeds and pulses. He congratulates himself for his perseverance and for the improvement of the business. Over the years, he was able to successfully increase his production and his sales. According to him, we must find solutions to the two most urgent issues facing our agriculture: unemployment in the countryside, and rural exodus….