FROM an intense espresso in Rome to a skinny double-shot iced latte with hazelnut syrup in California, coffee has never been more popular, or more lucrative.

But a documentary by two brothers from Brighton threatens to do for the multibillion-pound coffee industry what Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me did for fast food: shock consumers into thinking again what they are buying.

Black Gold, which has its British premiere at The Times BFI 50th London Film Festival tonight, charts the struggle of an Ethiopian coffee farmers’ collective to persuade Western buyers to pay them a fairer price for their produce.

Coffee is the world’s second most heavily traded commodity, after oil, and two billion cups of it are drunk a day, generating £40 billion a year. Yet most of the 25 million coffee growers receive less than 2p for every £2 cup of coffee sold.

In Ethiopia, where coffee was first drunk more than 1,000 years ago, and more than 15 million people depend on it for survival, desperate growers are digging up their coffee trees to grow the narcotic qat instead.

Marc and Nick Francis, the co-directors of Black Gold, said that the giants of the industry had failed to pass on the benefits of soaring profits.

“Coffee is one of the most explicit examples of who’s winning and who’s losing in the global economy,” Nick Francis said. “Over the last ten to fifteen years the people in the coffee business — the likes of Starbucks, Kraft, Nestlé and Procter & Gamble — have been making record profits while the coffee farmers are in crisis.”

Only consumers had the power to change this. “If they bought products only from companies that they know have a genuine ethical standard, these companies will have to change their behaviour.”

Black Gold follows Tadesse Meskela, the manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers CoOperative Union, on a journey round the world as he attempts to secure a better deal for the 74,000 farmers he represents.

The contrast between the poverty in which many farmers live and the prosperity of the high street coffee bars he encounters underlines Mr Meskela’s belief that the prospects for change hinge on drinkers taking more interest in where their cappuccinos come from.

The Francis brothers tried in vain to persuade Starbucks and the four multinationals that dominate the industry to take part in their film. But Starbucks is now spearheading a public relations counter-attack, starting with Mr Meskela.

After the company took him to Seattle with other farmers in May, he said: “This year we sold more litres of coffee to Starbucks and they paid us a very good price, which is better than the Fairtrade price. So we want this type of pricing for our coffees to improve the lives of farmers.”

FIVE FILMS TO SEE TODAY

- Taxidermia, 1pm Odeon West End
Grotesque and provocative

- Free Floating 4.15pm, National Film Theatre 1
Quirky Russian small-town comedy

- Fresh Air, 2pm, NFT1
Award-winning Hungarian drama

- The Wedding Director, 1.30pm, OWE1
Extravagant, surreal tale set in Sicily

- Bug, 4pm, OWE1
Horror, filmed almost entirely in one motel room

Tickets from the festival box office (020-7928 3232) or at www.lff.org.uk

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