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CADBURY'S GO FAIRTRADE
If you're committed to buying and supporting Fairtrade products, then there's some great news to celebrate.
On Wednesday, Cadbury announced that Cadbury Dairy Milk, their best known product, is to receive Fairtrade certification by late summer 2009. The annoucement from one of chocolate's market leaders is a feather in the cap pf the Fairtrade movement and of the Stop the Traffik Chocolate Campaign.
Steve Chalke, Stop the Traffik founder, said, ‘This is a very significant step in our campaign. We congratulate Cadburys on their commitment to justice and now look to their policy being adopted across their entire product range as well as to their lead being followed by other manufacturers. But the Stop the Traffik Chocolate Campaign marches on. We now call on Mars and other manufacturers to follow Cadbury’s lead and abandon their reliance on the use of cocoa produced through trafficked and exploitative forms of child labour.’
Stop the Traffik CEO, Ruth Dearnley added, ’Cadbury’s decision demonstrates the power of ordinary consumers to bring about change and freedom. Two years ago, when STOP THE TRAFFIK met with Cadbury we were told that the decision we have witnessed today was impossible and impracticable. This is a victory for every person who has complained, campaigned and spread the message. But most of all it is a victory for every child held in exploitative labour on the cocoa farms of West Africa. However, let us not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory - they will not be set free until Mars and Nestle and Lindt and Hershey and all the others have the integrity to put human rights before profit and make similar announcements.’
Central to Stop the Traffik's campaign has been the indications that thousands of children are being trafficked onto cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast and across West Africa to harvest the cocoa that makes the chocolate that the world consumes. This is despite the fact that industry committed in 2001 to remove all forms of exploitative child labour from the chocolate supply chain, little progress has been made.
Stop the Traffik, a global movement against people trafficking founded in 2006, has been calling for individual companies to take responsibility for the chocolate they sell and asking for it to be traffik free.
Today's news should cause us to celebrate that in summer 2009 there will be another traffik free chocolate bar, but also to continue to pray and campaign that more company's and producers will make the same commitment.
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Andy Freeman, 05/03/2009 |
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