This is a great article I found in the New York Times Magazine while I was home in Miami. It is an article about Andrew Rugasira and his company Good African Coffee. Rugasira shared with the Times that there is a vicious cycle of harvesting great coffee beans from the Central Africa by foreign investors that would then sell the beans for a large profit to large retailers like WalMart and Nestle. This is what the article had to say about Rugasira’s perspective:
No longer would his country merely sell its unroasted beans to exporters who supplied the European and American coffee kings, from Nestlé to Starbucks; no longer would his nation just provide the raw material for someone else’s riches. In the stores, his roasts would take their place beside the high-end brands.
Rugasira’s drive was the resistance of globalization in draining out his country’s resources. Large corporations ignore the fact that they are draining a country of a potential cash cow. If the people were able to produce and harvest the bean their own then sell them to the large companies, it would surely kick-start the economy.
