Good news for chocolate lovers
Cadbury Dairy Milk will be fair trade by Easter.
Now I know that CDM is fairly plebeian chocolate and that many of my friends have more refined tastes, but frankly I'm a chocolate pleb and I prefer milk chocolate to dark (which once you get above 65% cocoa mass tastes like burnt cardboard to my troglodyte palate). There are plenty of nice fair trade chocolates out there, but they tend to be expensive and fair trade milk chocolate can be harder to find. Cadbury won't be increasing the price of its bog-standard, ordinary chocolate.
The great thing about this is that it represents a significant change in thinking. This is the result of ordinary consumers saying that fair trade is important. Much of the world's cocoa is produced by child slavery - and if you don't know that your chocolate is fair trade then you don't know that you're not contributing to that. Organic chocolate, according to Choice, is more likely to be produced under fair trade conditions, which means that suppliers are also being paid a fair amount for their labour. I'm sure Cadbury is a nice right-thinking company (like most of the British chocolate industry it was founded by Quakers, so it has an anti-slavery connection from the beginning), but I'm also sure that it's taken the recognition of a genuine consumer demand for ethically-produced chocolate to prompt them to make this kind of change.
I'm ashamed to say I haven't always been rigorous about buying only fair trade chocolate, but if there's cheap reasonable-quality fair trade chocolate available then there's really no excuse. Particularly for Easter, and particularly for children - do you really want to be feeding children chocolate produced by the slavery of other children?
So, following my new practice of writing fan mail, I'll be congratulating Cadbury on their decision, and asking them when their drinking chocolate will be fair trade too.