IELTS writing task 1: table about sales of coffee and bananas

The tables below give information about sales of Fairtrade*-labelled coffee and bananas in 1999 and 2004 in five European countries.

The charts compare the amount of money spent by people in five different countries on Fairtrade coffee and bananas over two separate years.

It is clear that there were considerable upward trends in coffee sales, while the income of bananas declined remarkably in two out of five countries. Also, the UK saw the most dramatic rise over a period of 5 years.

Regarding the UK, in 1999, sales of Fairtrade coffee was half as much as that of Switzerland, 1.5 compared to 3 million euros. Over the following five years, sales figures in the UK exceeded Switzerland with the coffee income rocketing to 20 in millions of euros. A threefold jump was also seen in the UK earnings of bananas, at just under 50 million, leading to the peak level of income during the whole period.

As can be seen that Fairtrade earned much less money in Denmark, Belgium, and Sweden than in the other two mentioned countries. The lowest figure in the table was for Denmark income of bananas in 1999 (just over 0.5 million), but this went up wildly to 4 million euros 5 years later. Meanwhile, despite having marginal rises in coffee takings, sales of bananas in Sweden and Belgium then halved to roughly 1 million euro.