Cargill, the global food giant, joined the sustainability bandwagon in 2008 when the corporation joined the UTZ Certified Program for cocoa. In 2009, the first cooperatives in the Côte d’Ivoire had implemented the relevant codes of conduct and were certified by UTZ.
Now, a year later, the first premium payments totaling $400,000 were made to two cooperatives–Co-operative Agricole de Fiedifoue and Coopaga.
Cadbury Announces Plans for first Social Premium Disbursement
Cadbury, the latest convert to fairtrade, announced on Monday its plans for disbursing the first installment of its social premium. The funds, £500,000 ($751,215), will be invested in projects determined by the farmer cooperatives that supply the cocoa. One of the beneficiaries, the Kuapa Kokoo cooperative, will use its share to improve health services for its members through the deployment of mobile clinics and farmer extension services.
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Green & Black’s Goes All Fairtrade
Green & Black’s has just announced that it will source all commodities from fairtrade suppliers. That’s wonderful news and a boost to fairtrade producers worldwide. In 1994, Green & Black’s introduced the first fairtrade chocolate bar, Maya Gold, to the UK and later to the world. The beans for that bar are sourced from the Toledo Cocoa Growers Association, an organization I have covered on this blog before.
A Child Labor Update
In late September, the Payson Center at Tulane University released its third annual oversight report on efforts to eliminate the worst forms of child labor (WFCL) in the cocoa sectors of Ghana and the Côte d’Ivoire. Overall, the report takes a positive point of view. But hidden in various parts of the report remain serious questions as to the efficacy of the chocolate industry’s engagement with the Harkin Engel Protocol process. Continue reading “A Child Labor Update”
UK’s Kit Kat to go Fairtrade
Nestlé, the global food giant, announced that, starting in 2010, its Kit Kat bar in the UK will be made with fairtrade chocolate. In doing so, Nestlé is following the example set by Cadbury earlier this year. According to the BBC, Nestlé sells about 1 billion Kit Kats a year in the UK. The beneficiaries of this move will be the cocoa farmers in the Côte d’Ivoire who stand to receive hundreds of thousands pounds as a result of the decision as estimated by Harriet Lamb of the UK’s Fairtrade Foundation.
