Coffee break for Oxfam

Last week I organised an Oxfam coffee break for some colleagues at Otago Polytechnic after reading about the fund-raising and awareness-raising activity which was advertised in the New Internationalist.

The event was also promoted on TV3.

We had an interesting discussion over coffee after watching the Oxfam video. People talked about how the most profit is made at the branding and coffee bean processing stages so this got us into a discussion around the capitalist structure of our society - corporations, business models etc. We were very impressed to see how fairtrade pricing helps people with setting up "normal" life facilities like pumps for clean water, education etc.

One thing that came up was whether it was ethical to grow cash crops like coffee instead of food. Though I can see why they need cash to get facilities to improve their standard of living. I wonder how people in the countries you support manage to feed themselves adequately when coffee crops take up valuable growing land? It would be good to discuss this further.

The coffee was great and I tested out a new cake recipe - apricot and walnut sticky cake - only 3 tbsp of flour. We raised a good amount of money for a small group and had a fun time.