No, the globalists are not coming for our coffee
(it's the coffee farmers they're after)
“Now they don't want you drinking coffee!”
Glancing at this YouTube title on a grey, miserable January day gave me a feeling of panic. Two strong black coffees a day help me endure dark winter mornings.
I needed to know more. According to the video, “they” are the World Economic Forum, and the reason is climate change madness.
I did an online search to find out more, and two links stood out. One was from a website called BizPac Review that opened with the line: “The climate zealots are now coming after your morning java.” It said a Swiss banker named Hubert Keller was behind the dastardly scheme, and it carried a list of tweets from enraged caffeine addicts.
The other link that drew my attention was from a fact-checking site called Techarp that labelled the story FAKE NEWS and said Hubert Keller and the WEF “Did Not Declare War On Coffee” [sic].
Which one was right? The BizPac Review post carried an embedded tweet with a short snippet from Keller's presentation. The words that had caused all the excitement were:
“...the coffee that we all drink emits between 15 and 20 tonne of CO2 per tonne of coffee. So, we should all know that... every time we drink coffee we are basically putting CO2 into the atmosphere.” This does make me wonder how many tonnes of coffee Keller drinks.
In any case, I wanted to know what else Keller had said, not just a short snippet, apparently cut off in mid-sentence. So I looked up the discussion forum, from Davos 2024, which was called “Putting a Price on Nature”.
After watching the discussion, my conclusion was that no, the WEF is not coming for our coffee – and neither are the Swiss bankers.
The truth is significantly more disturbing.
The title says it all: “Putting a Price on Nature”. Presenter Nick Studer described it as "a cheeky title” and the Brazilian Minister of the Environment who spoke at the end said it should be about putting a value on nature. I think she's right, but that wasn't what was under discussion. This was about bankers and industrialists putting a price on nature – they want to sell it to us, but pesky farmers are getting in the way. That was the subtext I gleaned from it. It seems that they want to do this in the name of reversing climate change and “protecting Mother Earth”.
“nature is probably going to become a very significant asset class, one in which financial investors are going to want to invest”
The Swiss banker Hubert Keller, a senior managing partner at Lombard Odier, frequently referred to “nature assets”. He spoke not about valuing nature, but “unlocking” its value, and the “climate premium”. A “premium” is generally defined as an amount paid in addition to the standard rate. These are financial terms, and this is primarily about viewing nature as a financial asset.
Keller said: “We’ve taken the view at Lombard Odier that nature is probably going to become a very significant asset class, one in which financial investors are going to want to invest because they are going to appreciate over time.”
Regenerative farming practices, he said, improve the quality of these nature assets, and can also increase their productivity.
I'm all for regenerative farming practices. I understand that many small farmers are too. What I don't like is the idea of banking and big business taking control of the way these practices are carried out.
My personal interest in this is that most of the coffee I consume comes from the FairTrade supplier CafeDirect. I remember when CafeDirect started in the early 1990s. My sister had been working in Nicaragua and then Guatemala, and the she told me about the unrest in those countries, how coffee growing had become an intense political issue because the growers were unfairly treated and very poorly paid. Fair trade became a big issue from that time, and distributors like CafeDirect and Equal Exchange were founded to build more direct trading links so that growers could get a better deal, without most of the money going to middlemen.
The movement became so successful that some UK farmers also sought fair trade practices.
I remember really wanting to support CafeDirect back in the early 1990s, but at that time their coffee was terrible! Things have changed thankfully, and now CafeDirect is my coffee of choice, for taste as well as my preference for fair trade.
I choose FairTrade for selfish reasons
I almost wrote “for ethical reasons”, but this isn't about ethics or moral choices. It's not about being virtuous or “doing good”. It's about choosing the kind of world that I want to live in, a world where there is real competition and market choice, where small businesses can flourish, a world not dominated by a handful of global corporations.
I support UK small farmers for the same reason, with regular organic veg box deliveries. It also supports my health, so it's fair trade all round.
I'm suspicious of the bankers and big businesses that talk about the “great nature opportunities”. They like to use the language of the FairTrade and grassroots environmental movements, a bit like the wolf in sheep's clothing. Hubert Keller continued:
“...most of the coffee growers live below the poverty line, and it’s an incredibly fragmented industry where on average a coffee grower farms a little bit more than one hectare.
“The opportunity is to basically bring capital for return in this value chain, to basically acquire or lease these production – these coffee assets, these monocultural assets – to transform them into a regenerative agro-forestry model. In doing so we would create effectively a climate and a nature premium which would have a lot of value...”
Another panellist was Ron Hosepian of Indigo Ag, a billion dollar company that has developed a method of applying microbes to seeds to improve yields. The method is described as environmentally-friendly, and it may well be, but the firm's acquisition in 2018 of a satellite imaging startup called TellusLabs raises questions in my mind.
The satellite imagery is apparently used to improve accuracy of forecasts for crop yields. But satellites can also be used for surveillance, as Patrick Wood describes in his research into technocracy. They are also far from being environmentally friendly when we consider the enormous numbers which are being sent into orbit.
They use the imagery without the trading ideals behind it.
I increasingly notice that big multinational chocolate firms use images of happy looking plantation workers in their advertising. It makes me think they are trying to appear more fair tradey, which is quite sickening on the one hand, as they're taking the imagery without the trading ideals behind it. The reason the plantation owners and workers in fair trade imagery look happy is because they're getting fairly paid for their work, and about time!
On the other hand, it shows that the FairTrade movement really has disrupted the global coffee and chocolate market, which is a good thing.
But the WEF seems to want to disrupt it back.