Tea and Coffee Documentary: The Hidden Story in the Cups
Exposing the labor exploitation and colonial legacies hidden behind your daily cup of tea and coffee.
That steaming mug of coffee in your hand—a comforting ritual, a morning kickstart—contains far more than beans and water. It holds a complex tapestry of history, economics, and, most profoundly, the stories of the hands that brought it to you.
When the powerful insights from the Tea and Coffee Documentary are read alongside the academic critique offered by Coffee Time, a deeply unsettling yet necessary truth emerges: our daily brew is often steeped in labor exploitation—particularly of women—and sustained by enduring colonial economic structures.
Though different in form, both works converge on an uncomfortable reality. The global coffee industry generates billions in revenue, yet the primary producers—especially women—remain trapped in cycles of poverty, invisibility, and exclusion.
The Invisible Hands: Women at the Core of Exploitation
The documentary presents a stark portrayal of women as the primary yet largely invisible workforce in tea and coffee production. From plucking tea leaves in Assam to harvesting coffee cherries in Latin America, women carry out the most labor-intensive tasks. Despite this, they are routinely denied recognition, fair wages—sometimes earning as little as three dollars a day—and meaningful decision-making power.
Their labor is labeled “unskilled,” their voices excluded from union leadership and management, and their daughters inherit the same precarity. Compounding this injustice is the “double burden” women carry: exhausting agricultural labor followed by unpaid domestic work.
Coffee Time echoes these realities through a critical Afrocentric lens. While broadly focused on African economic autonomy, the book foregrounds feminist labor ethics, emphasizing women’s central role in agriculture and informal economies. It challenges conventional economic metrics by recognizing unpaid and undercompensated labor as both economically and spiritually vital.
Through personal and intergenerational narratives—particularly the author’s own family experiences within the coffee sector—Coffee Time validates what it calls “embodied knowledge.” These lived experiences mirror the generational inequities depicted in the documentary, reinforcing how deeply entrenched and systemic this exploitation remains.
The Colonial Legacy of Value Extraction
Both works underscore how the global coffee supply chain operates through an extractive economic model. The documentary indicts multinational corporations for profiting enormously while failing to protect workers at the base of the supply chain. The injustice is glaring: vast global profits contrasted with subsistence-level wages for producers.
Coffee Time situates this imbalance within its historical and structural context. It argues that colonial regimes designed African economies to export raw commodities, ensuring that value addition—roasting, packaging, branding—and profit extraction occur elsewhere. This colonial architecture persists today.
Economic decolonization, as proposed in Coffee Time, means moving up the value chain and reclaiming ownership of production and distribution. The “asymmetry in value extraction” the book critiques directly explains the disparity highlighted in the documentary—where low wages coexist with billion-dollar industries. Micro-level labor, such as coffee berry picking, is inextricably linked to macro-level profit mechanisms.
Silenced Voices, Suppressed Knowledge
Another shared theme is the systematic silencing of local voices and the devaluation of indigenous knowledge. The documentary reveals how women are excluded from leadership and negotiations, rendering their labor—and expertise—invisible.
Coffee Time expands this critique to the broader development and academic discourse. It condemns the “developmentalist gaze” that renders African communities passive or invisible while sidelining local expertise. By centering African farmers, traders, entrepreneurs, and women, the book restores agency to those long excluded from decision-making processes.
This validation of local epistemologies directly counters the invisibility experienced by women in the documentary and challenges dominant narratives that privilege external solutions over lived knowledge.
Rethinking Development: Beyond GDP, Toward Dignity
Both works ultimately challenge conventional definitions of development and progress. The documentary implicitly questions the effectiveness of certification schemes that fail to address structural exploitation, urging viewers to confront the gendered injustice embedded in everyday consumption.
Coffee Time takes this further by dismantling linear modernization models and proposing alternative frameworks for evaluating development—ones rooted in dignity, relational well-being, and local autonomy rather than consumption-driven metrics like GDP.
True development, the book argues, must be context-specific and producer-led. It must empower communities—particularly women—not merely with a voice, but with ownership, control, and fair compensation.
Every Sip Tells a Story
Together, the Tea and Coffee Documentary and Coffee Time form a powerful call to action. The documentary vividly exposes who is exploited and how, drawing attention to the human cost of global consumption. Coffee Time provides the intellectual tools to understand why this exploitation persists, linking it to colonial legacies, global capitalism, and the dominance of foreign epistemologies.
They compel us to look beyond the romanticized image of “coffee time” and recognize it, as Coffee Time suggests, as a marker of labor exploitation. Our daily rituals are not neutral—they carry the weight of history and the silenced stories of millions of women.
Acknowledging this truth demands more than awareness. It requires confronting gendered injustice, advocating for fair wages, land rights, and representation, and reimagining a global system where every cup of coffee can be enjoyed without the bitter aftertaste of exploitation.
