No fairness in coffee trade

As a seasoned East African expatriate I would like to share some background on coffee with your readers.
There are two basic types of coffee: Arabica (Kenya, Tanzania, Central America etc.), full of aroma and high acidity and the much inferior cheaper Robusta (Uganda, Ivory Coast, for example) with little taste and in essence a filler only. It is that filler that the North American coffee traders love to buy in vast quantities. To give you an idea: in my time (a long time ago now) Kenya/Tanzania Arabica fetched £600 a ton and Uganda Robusta (grown at lower altitudes) £175 a ton. My guess is that that gap still exists.
A friend who knows well the coffee trade assures me that the traditional middlemen have, for all intents and purposes, been eliminated by the powerful buyers/roasters. The middlemen can no longer be accused of causing the plight of the farmers. I reason that supporting the suffering coffee farmers only puts them further in the mud. Better would be for them to diversify, as the Frisians in the Netherlands had to do from declining dairy into cash crops like wheat and beans. Farmers in the prairies let wheat go in favour of flax, canola and alfalfa in pellets.