The Institute for Liberal Values (ILV) is a community of people committed to the free exchange of ideas. I have known it primarily through the involvement of my spouse, a librarian who is a champion of free expression and an expert on obstacles to it.
I am very pleased that ILV has asked me to participate in a few different activities this year. One of them is simply an opportunity for me to talk about the story of coffee and some of its implications. Our Coffee Talk session is streaming today -- Monday, October 21 -- at 7 pm Eastern Time on YouTube.
You can view the slides I used in this presentation in order to follow links that I referenced. You can watch the event recording (47m) on the ILV YouTube channel.
Lagniappe
During the presentation, I mentioned the 2006 film Black Gold: Wake Up and Smell the Coffee, and that it depicts a jarring contrast between the prosperous coffee industry and the growers who supply it. I mentioned that it also provides some insight into the workings of commodity markets, but the ILV audience may have been interested to know that the film goes a bit further -- it goes inside a meeting of the World Trade Organization to show how the imbalance between producers and consumers is maintained. I discuss this movie and the film The Girl in the Café in Cups and Summits, a 2012 post on my main blog.
