Fair Trade Chocolate
By Krishna RauThe fair trade movement – which ensures that farmers in the developing world are paid a fair price for their crops – has been a resounding success with coffee beans, forcing the world’s biggest sellers to sign up. The next major battleground for fair trade may be a product equally addictive: chocolate.
In Britain, Green & Black began selling fair trade chocolate from Belize under the label of Maya Gold 10 years ago. Sales have now risen to £13m annually.
Maya Gold is produced using cocoa grown by Mayan farmers in Toledo, an impoverished jungle region in southern Belize. While the Mayans were the first to produce chocolate, the majority of the world’s cocoa is now grown on densely planted, heavily fertilised and pesticide-sprayed plantations in Ivory Coast, Ghana, Malaysia and Brazil.
According to The Guardian, in 1993, Green & Black offered to buy organically-grown Toledo beans for 63 cents a pound – roughly 10 percent higher than the market rate at the time, and to keep that rate. While the world market swings wildly (40 cents a pound in 2000; 80 cents in 2002) Green & Black pays a set 89 cents.
This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Under-reported. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.
This sounds like a conscience clear choice. the problem with international markets for what begins as organically grown goods such as coffee and chocolate, is that once the volume of demand becomes past a crucial point, as it always does on international markets, the volumes of growth required to keep up with demand destroys the sustainability so carefully, originally accpmplished. So, the next time you want to have chocolate or coffee, think twice - how much pressure are you putting on the farmers who are attempting to grow this product for your sweet tooth or your coffee break?
I’m about to take a coffee break now, and I might have one of those chocolates placed right beside the coffee display. How easy it is to forget the struggling farms and lands, right?! that is life, now, in most of the world. On television, in real life, and in movies, to have someplace important to go and to say, to wear nice things, and to have a chocolate or a paper cup of coffee in your hand is ‘where it’s at’.