October 04, 2007
Coffee and Gender Equity
Which of the eight Millennium Development Goals most applies to Fair Trade month? If you said Goal 8 which is to Develop a Global Partnership for Development, you wouldn't be wrong. Promoting Fair Trade is one step that the wealthier countries can take to enhance this partnership with the developing world.
But there is another goal that applies very well in this case. It's Goal 3, which is to Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women. The movie Strong Coffee: The Story of Cafe Femenino tells the story of a coffee cooperative in northern Peru where women are the principal decision-makers.
The movement is about to spread around the world. There is an effort via the Vancouver (WA)-based Cafe Femenino Foundation to duplicate the experience of northern Peru in other coffee-growing countries.
The movie is scheduled to be shown at three locations in Canada and one in the U.S. over the next several months. The U.S. screening will be at the Rocky Mountain Women's Film Festival in Colorado Springs on Saturday, Nov. 3. Hopefully, this remarkable movie will soon come to a movie theater near you or will be available for wide distribution via other means.
Carlos Navarro is writer-editor for SourceMex, a weekly newsletter on political and economic issues, published by the Latin America Data Base at the University of New Mexico
