A fair deal

We meet some of our Fairtrade suppliers and learn how a few simple choices can help to change lives. From chocolate to coffee and quinoa, buying Fairtrade can improve living and working conditions for farmers, support the fight against child slavery and help cope with the challenges of climate change

TONY’S CHOCOLONELY: END CHILD SLAVERY

“The sole reason we exist is to end child slavery,” says Ben Greensmith of Tony’s Chocolonely. According to a Fairtrade Foundation report published in October 2020, more than 1.48 million children are engaged in hazardous child labour in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, where most of the world’s cocoa comes from. “The root cause of the problem is poverty. Farmers can’t pay for labour on their farms and take children out of school to work on them. In the worst cases, children are trafficked into slavery from neighbouring countries.”

It’s this that prompted Dutch journalist Teun van de Keuken into action in 2003. To raise awareness, he tried to get himself convicted of child slavery in a Dutch court, hiring a lawyer and even getting former child slaves to testify against him. But the judge wouldn’t convict him. Instead, van de Keuken founded Tony’s Chocolonely. “We make a great-tasting, great-looking chocolate, but we’re not a chocolate company,” says Ben. “We’re a human impact company that just happens to make chocolate. The unequally divided bar symbolises the unequal nature of the industry. We’ve even hidden a map of West Africa in there. It’s all about making people aware of what they are consuming.” And it works. In Holland, where Tony’s is the best-selling chocolate brand, 70 per cent of people are aware of the problem of child slavery in the cocoa supply chain. In the UK awareness is at 30 per cent.