A few posts ago I wrote a report about Made Weneh, the self employed cacao farmer from Indonesia. A local organisation supported him by giving him a loan and some education so he is now able to maintain his farm in an environment- and human-friendly way, because he both knows and can. Unfortunately a lot of farmers around the world still don’t have this choice. They don’t have the knowledge and often don’t have the resources to make such a decision.
A Dutch reporter, Teun van der Keuken, made a documentary over a few episodes of the Dutch television programme “Keuringsdienst van Waarde” about child slavery in the cocoa industry in and around Ivory Coast. Please watch this summary/trailer:
Last year, Dutch company “Verkade“, which is responsible for about 15% of all the chocolate in the world, made a change in their policies. All the chocolate bars they now produce is made of Fair Trade/Max Havelaar certified cocoa. This is a great step forward for many many people in poor Afrika!
Unfortunately this is not where it ends. Big chocolate manufacturers like Nestle still hardly seem to care and still contribute bigtime to the problem. Besides chocolate, the coffee and banana industries are also very problematic. A new documentary called “BANANAS” about Dole Bananas reports about abuse in the banana industry by big American company Dole as you can see in this short trailer:
So, after all this bad news, what can we do? Because as the first video already mentioned, it is the customer who has a big part in this. Buying Fair Trade or Organic products is always a good thing to do, but often very expensive. Then again the Verkade chocolate bars, which are being produced in large quantities, are quite affordable and if you *know* it’s good you can enjoy more with less! The coffee industry also produced their own label as a competitor to Fair Trade, which is called Utz Certified (formerly known as Utz Kapeh) wich is used by several coffee labels as well. There are some things that could be questioned about this label: for example why would you want to check your own products and not let an independent organisation do so? And why is it possible that only a percentage of the coffee that you buy with this label is produced “fair”? On the other hand a lot of this coffee can be traced back to the farm where it was produced. This indicates transparancy which is always good in these cases.
Let’s end this story with some good news: a new Starbucks restaurant opened at Utrecht central station! Why is that such good news? Because Starbucks is one of the worlds biggest buyers of FairTrade coffee! A large percentage of their coffee is fair trade at this very moment. As I quote from their website:
Increasing our purchases of Fair Trade Certified coffee will result from the critical steps in our collaboration toward achieving our Starbucks™ Shared Planet™ goal of 100 percent responsibly grown, ethically traded coffee by 2015.
Since I’ve been quite moralistic throughout this post anyway I would like to end with a quote of Plato, the Greek guy ;). A little obvious perhaps, yet very true and a great help when deciding what chocolate to buy:
“The greatest wealth is to live content with little.”
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