Sweet reflections

Blog post DP2 of 4 for the subject Socio-Economic Development Perspectives

With the availability of certified Fair Trade products now in the market, such as Fair Trade chocolate, coffee and tea, what questions are then raised about the ‘fairness’ of those brands and products that are not certified as Fair Trade? Furthermore, what position does this leave the consumer in with regards to moral decision making?

If you want a sweet chocolate fix, you can get chocolate usually within minutes from a supermarket, small convenience shop or vending machine. And these products and brands of chocolate are most commonly the products and brands of the big multinational players.

For example, Nestle has KitKat, Smarties, Crunch, Lion Bar; Cadbury has Dairy Milk, Twirl, Flake, Crunchie; Mars has Mars Bar, Snickers, Twix and M&Ms. And as I was writing this blog I just researched Toblerone to see who owns it and in fact it is owned by Kraft and what I actually also discovered is that Kraft now owns Cadbury! In other words, the chocolate industry in Europe and United States is owned by just a handful of multinational player who produce a range of different chocolate products and brands.

While these products and brands represent the vast majority of the chocolate market, I could not find any of these companies that actually produce certified Fair Trade chocolate products. Although several of them talk about corporate responsibility on their website or claim to be ‘partnering’ with Fair Trade organizations, at the end of the day, in my consumer eyes, their products are still not certified as Fair Trade and therefore do not meet the standards which other smaller producers have proven to be achievable.

Although I have been eating chocolate my entire life, the truth was I knew almost nothing about the chocolate industry, about cocoa and where it actually originates from. Furthermore, what was Fair Trade chocolate exactly about? Is it just another marketing tool? So, I did some research recently on the issue and thanks to the power of the internet, I have been able to read about the supply chain of the chocolate industry. An industry that heavily relies on cocoa farming in West Africa to supply about 70-80% of all the world’s cocoa to our chocolate producers. This is how the supply chain works:

1. Cocoa is harvested from the cocoa farmer’s plantations
2. The intermediaries then buys the cocoa from the plantations at around 1 EUR a kilo
3. The intermediaries then sell the cocoa to national exporters
4. The national exporters then sell the cocoa to the international markets at around 2.5 EUR a kilo
5. The cocoa is then sold from the international markets to the chocolate manufacturers
6. The chocolate manufacturers can then turn 1 kilo of cocoa into approximately 40 standard chocolate bars

In other words, a kilo of cocoa at 1 EUR for the farmer, can become 40 chocolate bars for the manufacturer…you can do the maths!

This supply chain model leads to a huge inequality in the distribution of wealth from the final product and does not allow the farmers to develop their business and in turn the local community. As a result, this model also encourages cocoa farmers to resort to the trafficking of child labour in order to avoid labor costs. According to several documentaries available on the internet, this practice of child labor is present throughout many of West Africa’s cocoa plantations, mainly in the Ivory Coast, where children as young as 7-14 are trafficked from neighboring countries in order to be used as free labor. The children do not go to school, work extremely long days, do not receive wages, work with dangerous equipment and pesticides and often do not even speak the local language. In other words, they are the perfect victims of child slavery. These issues are exhibited by the video featured below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHDxy04QPqM

So, what we essentially have in the chocolate industry is a handful of developing countries supplying the raw material to a handful of multinational companies who sell their products and keep their profits in the developed countries. All this, while the majority of consumers enjoy their chocolate without the faintest idea about what had to happen to get to the cocoa to make that chocolate.

Since learning about the reality of the chocolate industry supply chain, the ubiquitous chocolate products from the big players have now taken on a new representation of unfairness for me. On the other hand, I now perceive the true value of Fair Trade products.

However, according to an official statement issued by the association of chocolate producers, the chocolate producers do not take corporate responsibility for this unfairness, claiming that “the vast majority of cocoa farms are not owned by the companies that make chocolate or supply cocoa and we therefore don’t have direct control over cocoa farming and labour practices”.

I understand that the companies that produce Fair Trade chocolate are usually smaller companies that serve a niche market and have more direct contact with the farmers. But in my opinion, I do not think it is fair for the big multinationals to deflect responsibility by playing the indirect-cause-and-effect card. By the same token, where does that then leave us as consumers in our daily lives? If we believe it is immoral for the multinationals to deflect responsibility, what right do we then have to claim that we are also not responsible for what happens in the stages of the supply chain before the product reaches us? In other words, where do you draw the line of responsibility?

Where ever you draw the line, one thing is clear, we the final consumers of chocolate products ultimately have the power to change the rules of the game by supporting only those products that meet Fair Trade standards. Multinational companies will only change their supply chain practices and definitions of responsibility when they see a significant consumer demand for Fair Trade products. However, here is the challenge for consumers, Fair Trade products are few and far between and chocolate is everywhere and it is in many different forms and in many different products…again, where do you draw the line? If you feel like chocolate and there is no Fair Trade products available, do you sacrifice your taste buds for the greater good of development? And what about that chocolate ice-cream or chocolate cake most likely made from multinational cocoa products..should you also question your support for these products?

Therefore, even though Fair Trade business models do offer a feasible solution to the inequality of the modern day economic trade system, the Fair Trade movement still has considerable challenges ahead in the chocolate market before it can start to make a real impact to promote fair and sustainable economic development for the majority of cocoa farmers in West Africa. And if you are anything like me and want to support Fair Trade but at the same time you love chocolate…you may unfortunately find yourself with somewhat of a consumer complex…torn between your heart and your stomach as you try to navigate the aisles of our daily consumer lives. The below video is however a source of inspiration for me that Fair Trade products are worth the extra consumer effort to find…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Comments Off on Sweet reflections / 03 Dec 2012 por Daniel Salter
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