A Summary of Promises and Poverty
By: Raven Johnson
September 26, 2018
Global Issues
Before sitting down and taking my time to read this article, I looked at the title to see what type of article I would be reading. The title of the article is called “Promises and Poverty”. To me, I felt like the article was going to be about something that has to deal with a country in poverty, but also a country that has been made promises to. After I read the article, I came to the conclusion that the main idea of this article is about Starbucks making billions of dollars off of a country that is living in poverty, and also making less than $1 per day, also known as Ethiopia. The main points of this article included: “25 New US stores per week, Sharper focus on Africa, family income: 66 Cents a day, Ethiopian Ecology Suffers, and Deforestations takes a troll. Next, I will talk about each of these main points in the article.
Starbucks has become so successful over the past few years that they started to open 25 new stores each week in the US. Not only have they grew financially, but their clientele has also increased causing most of the US to drink at Starbucks every day. Starbucks also try to support the environment and third world famers by making promises to certain places where they get their ingredients from like their coffee beans. They mostly get their ingredients from Latin America, and some parts of Africa. The type of promises that they make to these places include things like water improvement, education, health services, etc. Starbucks also try to do friendly things like add photographs from coffee growing scenes. Even though Starbucks try to be nice, and support the African way of life, they don’t really show the reality of it. They only show what they want to show their customers. This is a problem because even with the promises, Ethiopia still lives in poverty and need more help and support from poverty then what they are getting.
Looking at a sharper focus in Africa, Africa 6% of all Starbucks purchases, all while Latin America is 70% of all Starbucks purchases. Starbucks main goal was to shrink the supply chain. Starbucks has a problem with Ethiopia though because they feel as though even though they are good for their supplies, Ethiopia is also causing a burden on them because of the man problems that they have. For example, the population in Ethiopia went from 52 million people to about 80 million people. Also, they have environmental problems l...
