2016
University project
coffee — posters
Miniature landscape infographic about colonial continuities in the coffee industry
Team: Heinrich Ehnert, Marcus Schwalm, Veronika Schneider
As part of a workshop on data visualization with la loma, we turned data about the coffee industry's profits into a three-dimensional miniature landscape.
The poster shows a ranking of the ten highest-earning countries for both exporting raw coffee (blue flags) and roasted coffee (yellow flags), while the height of their flag indicates the amount of coffee traded per year. The disparity in profits between raw coffee producers and roasters / traders is appareant. Countries in the Global South, which is where raw coffee was and is produced, were prevented from roasting and trading themselves by immoderate customs duties during colonial rule. The much more profitable business of roasting and trading coffee was thereby reserved for European businesspeople, while most of the profits along coffee's supply chain continues to flow into countries of the Global North until today.