According to several news sources, Cadbury-Schweppes is embarking on an ambitious program to get all of its chocolate from Fair Trade sources. First up is the iconic Dairy Milk bar, and it’s a UK-only program for now. A story in the Guardian says that the high current price of chocolate on the open market makes the switch to fairly traded chocolate economically easy, but Cadbury has set a “floor” price which will never go down, even if the market declines. This should ensure that the chocolate farmers (primarily in Ghana) where Dairy Milk starts its journey to your hips, will always receive a fair price. (Read more about Fair Trade concepts here.)
Even better, though, is that Cadbury will add a $150 per tonne “social premium”. That’s just under 10% of the cost of the chocolate. From the Guardian story:
The terms of the Cadbury agreement will triple the volume of Fairtrade cocoa bought from Ghana to 15,000 tonnes, with the social premium ploughed into farming communities weakened by urbanisation and low crop yields. Poor incomes are discouraging young people from farming cocoa in the country, where the average age of cocoa farmers is 51. It is therefore seen as also in the interest of chocolate manufacturers such as Cadbury to increase farm incomes, securing sustainable supplies around the world.
Rival Mars has pledged to buy 100% of its cocoa from sustainable sources by 2020, and has chosen to work with the Rainforest Alliance, with the logo carried on its Galaxy bars. Nestlé, meanwhile, is working with the International and World Cocoa foundations.
Interestingly, Cadbury has for several years been at the forefront of ecological/environmental awareness — at least, at the margins, it has been. I read ages ago about a “bioplastic” that Cadbury is using for its trays of chocolates in Australia. The plastic, which is manufactured not from oil, but from corn, dissolves in the rain.
I know it’s early days, but I’m disappointed that these initiatives are still just in small parts of the world. Perhaps it’s an issue with corn-based plastic manufacturers having to ramp up their production? Kudos to Cadbury for being one of the apparent leaders in this area. I’d also like to note that for the past couple of years, at folk festivals in this area of western Canada, I’ve been drinking Big Rock beer out of compostable cups. Also, cupsuckers are awesome.
So there are some inroads being made, even in consumerist North America. Acutally, come to think of it, I also got a package a few weeks ago that had corn-based “plastic pellets” instead of those styrofoam peanuts as packing material. I ran them under the tap, and sure enough, they dissolve into slimy mush. It’s so much better than lives-forever styrofoam.
Maybe even Big Macs will go back to the once-iconic foam clamshell. Not that I’d eat them, mind you, but I would appreciate the design.
Grant Hamilton
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