Fair Trade gets a boost in Britain

It's a start. Cadbury has announced it is now going to buy fair trade chocolate from Ghanaian farmers for its Dairy Milk bars, apparently the top selling chocolate bar in the UK (according to this, that translates into 300 million bars a year in UK and Ireland). Why is this such good news? Two reasons. First, the cocoa fields of Ghana produce 40% of the country's total export revenues, yet cocoa farmers are living in abject poverty because most of the production occurs on plantations (you remember that word, right? one step below sharecropper) and individual, low volume producers are not able to get high enough prices to make their (very basic) bare essentials meet. Second, child labor on cocoa farms in West Africa is an enormous human rights problem. According to the International Institute on Tropical Agriculture, cited here:

An estimated 284,000 children are working on cocoa farms in hazardous tasks such as using machetes and applying pesticides and insecticides without the necessary protective equipment. Many of these children work on family farms, the children of cocoa farmers who are so trapped in poverty they have to make the hard choice to keep their children out of school to work. The IITA also reported that about 12,500 children working on cocoa farms had no relatives in the area, a warning sign for trafficking.

Robert Beckford has done an excellent -even highly entertaining - documentary that explores cocoa as well as rice and gold production in Ghana, The Great African Scandal. The kids working at fair trade farms do so after school, not in place of it; the difference this affects in the kids themselves is striking, on top of the fact that these farms are part of a community coop with all the atmospheric contrasts one might expect under that framework.

The fair trade farmers Beckford visits say that by the time it gets to the market, only 3-4% of all fair trade cocoa is actually sold at fair trade prices. The rest gets dumped together with 'regular' cocoa, sold at typical slave trade prices. Another victory for SAP (the IMF's Structural Adjustment Programs): liberalize the market but don't regulate the price structure. However, opening things up did create a situation in which daring farmers could take more control of their fate, which led eventually to the establishment of Divine Ltd in the UK, Ghana's first fair trade, coop-owned, cocoa company. Their products look a lot more appealing than Cadbury's, and the company now has a US section as well, but the idea here isn't that fair trade companies outcompete each other. The point is that ALL cocoa should be sold at fair trade prices, so kudos to Cadbury for taking this step and let's hope that more chocolatiers follow suit.