Catholic Relief Services launches new fair trade chocolate initiative

Social justice news
November 2005

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Catholic Relief Services launches new fair trade chocolate initiative
They're as familiar as the start of another school year: parochial school children waving bars of chocolate at passers-by or going door-to-door in one kind or another fundraising effort for their schools, clubs, or basketball teams. Most people are happy to buy the fundraising candy bars to help out, but what gets least attention in many of these small exchanges is the ethical center of the transaction.

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A CRS press conference unveils the agency's new Fair Trade chocolate initiative.

Quicktime 7 is recommended for best viewing.

Who grew the cocoa beans that were used to produce this fundraising premium? How well were those producers compensated? While retailers and manufacturers often can make a great deal of profit from finished product sales, growers and producers of raw commodities often get paid very little, subsistence or even below subsistence wages, for their crops. It's fair to wonder how fair the cocoa market has been to the growers and their communities and families.

Catholic Relief Services has been working on a sweet deal for consumers and producers. In a broadening of its existing efforts to promote fair trade alternatives to free market consumerism, CRS in September launched its Fair Trade Chocolate Program.

The CRS Fair Trade Chocolate Program will promote Divine Fair Trade Chocolate, the world’s first farmer-owned Fair Trade chocolate brand. CRS expects that the program will create a welcome opportunity for Catholics in the United States to act in economic solidarity with the farmers in Ghana whose cocoa is used in Divine chocolate.

"It's important to CRS to create opportunities for Catholic consumers to live out their faith with the choices they make every day as consumers," said Michael Sheridan, director of the CRS Fair Trade Chocolate Program. "We often hear from people who want to help but don't know what they can do. This program is an easy way for us to make a stand with people overseas who are all too often left on the sidelines of the global economy."

"Under the free market system," said Kwabena Ohemeng-Tinyase, Managing Director of the Kuapa Kokoo cooperative in Ghana that grows the cocoa used in Divine chocolate bars, "the price that was paid to the farmers was a peanut. But then come fair trade with a fixed minimum price and a top-off premium to support the farmers in their various localities." Because of fair trade premium prices, he said, farmers have been able to improve living conditions or create programs in education, health, and sanitation that had never existed before in their communities.

Divine brand Fair Trade chocolate is produced by the Day Chocolate Company, the world’s first farmer-owned Fair Trade chocolate company. The farmers who grow the cocoa in Divine chocolate are not only paid Fair Trade premiums for their beans, but they also own a third of the company that sells Divine chocolate. These Ghanaian cocoa farmers sit on the Day Chocolate Company’s Board of Directors, share in its profits, and participate in decisions about how the company is managed.

“Divine chocolate is 100 percent Fair Trade, which is wonderful. But what makes the Divine model so exciting from an economic justice perspective is the fact that the farmers themselves own part of the company,” Sheridan said. “CRS is proud to promote Divine chocolate, and salutes this dual commitment to Fair Trade and farmer-ownership.”

Participants in the CRS Fair Trade Chocolate Program can purchase Divine Fair Trade chocolate for their own consumption, give it as a gift, sell it as an ethical fundraiser, and encourage local store managers to serve it wherever chocolate is sold.

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