Green Chocolate?!
Green Chocolate?!
I’m writing this on Easter Monday, so it is terribly appropriate that I should be obsessing about chocolate…
Good News! (Just to prove that ethical issues aren’t all doom & gloom!). Cadbury announced in March that they are making their Dairy Milk range Fairtrade from this summer! That means that in Ghana, where Cadbury gets most of its cocoa, farmers will be paid a living wage, and there will as much as a guarantee as it is possible to get that there will be no slaves working on those farms.
SLAVES? In the 21st century? Yes – slaves. Slavery – which Christians 200 years ago campaigned against – is still alive and well, and represented not just in the red-light districts of large cities, but in every shop with a shelf of chocolate in the UK and beyond. It is estimated that working on cocoa plantations in Cote d’Ivoire (The Ivory Coast) are 36,000 child-slaves [UN figures], bought from desperate parents or tricked away from their families, beaten, ill-treated and forced to work for no money and little food. Do the chocolate companies know? Yes. Have they done anything about it? No.
Confronted with data from campaign groups like Stop the Traffik over 7 years ago, Cadbury, Mars, Hershey, Nestle & others pledged to monitor the plantations that supply them and ensure that child slaves were returned to their families where possible and looked after and educated where not. They did nothing. Until now.
Now, Cadbury has broken ranks to become the first major chocolate manufacturer to pledge to become Fairtrade. They are starting with Dairy Milk, and have plans to extend across their whole range. So what now? They need our support – yes – I am asking you to go out & buy chocolate!!! Apparently we are all eating more of it anyway to cheer ourselves up in the recession, and you can bet that it won’t just be Cadbury looking anxiously at its figures over the next year to see if becoming Fairtrade makes a difference to sales, Mars, Hershey, Nestle et al will also be keeping track. If Cadbury’s great experiment is to push other manufacturers in the same direction then Cadbury sales need to soar, and those of Mars, Nestle, etc need to drop. Only then will these corporations, hurting where they hurt most – in their profits – consider doing the same, and then there will be the prospect of a decent wage for cocoa farmers and an end to imprisonment for thousands of child slaves.
This may mean some hard choices being made – ditching your Maltesers (a Mars brand) or Yorkie (Nestle) for a Crunchie or Caramel (Cadbury), but ultimately you will be treating yourself in the knowledge that there are no slave children involved in your pleasure, and with the right profit-related incentive, the other big manufacturers will hopefully cave sooner, leaving all chocolate treats guilt-free.
Oh, and don’t forget the original Fairtrade brands – Divine, Traidcraft, and the Co-operative’s own chocolate – it wouldn’t make sense if their sales, and therefore their growers, suffered because the big players have started to see sense.
And whilst you’re considering boycotts, you may not be aware, but Nestle (which owns too many brands to mention here, but they don’t just make chocolate and coffee), is still being accused of aggressively marketing baby formula in developing countries. In the past they have given away free samples in maternity hospitals, promoted their milk as modern, western, and an improvement on breastfeeding, and so mothers with no access to sterilisers or clean water have given up breastfeeding in favour of crippling their household budgets to buy formula. And their babies have become ill. Nestle has consistently refused to sign up to W.H.O. guidelines on the marketing of baby milk. For more information please see Baby Milk Action, and please consider whether you want to be buying Nestle products at all…