Bitter Chocolate (43 page)

Craig Sams's dreamy idea that selling to agribusiness constitutes a “reverse takeover” that will teach the big folks about corporate responsibility is difficult to substantiate in view of the robust effort by the transnational food industry to dilute the rules and regulations for determining what should be called “organic.” The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is the agency that sets the standards for the organic label (most of Canada's organic food lines come from the United States). The original regulations for organic certification were established in the 1970s by the grassroots consumer organizations that had launched the food lines. At the time, the food corporations ignored the process, even when those regulations became enshrined in law.

None of them could have imagined that so many consumers would demand alternatives to their mass-produced products. Now they know: Green sells. Organic is good. The big food companies began to pressure the U.S. government to reverse some of the stringent conditions that assure the integrity of the food that claims to be different and healthier. They want to lift the prohibitions on genetic modification and irradiation and the use of questionable types of fertilizer. Since the rash of corporate takeovers in the organic food movement, the USDA has several times attempted to change the laws to allow hormones and antibiotics in dairy cattle, pesticides on produce and questionable fishmeal as feed for livestock. The Organic Trade Association (OTA) does much of the lobbying for change. Once dominated by back-to-the-land types, the OTA now includes Dole, Kraft, the Grocery Manufacturers of America, General Mills and Tyson. The primary
funding for the OTA's policy research and advocacy comes from the biggest corporations.

The supermarkets that now sell Odwalla and Kashi right next to Chips Ahoy and Sugar Pops argue that consumers are the biggest force behind watering down the rules. People want organic food, but they want it to be cheaper. The big corporations with their marketing potential can do that, while at the same time finding more inexpensive sources of the raw ingredients that make up organic foods, mostly by paying farmers less money. The organic movement has now been almost entirely co-opted by the same market forces that compel agribusiness and that have driven farmers into poverty around the world: pushing costs down, pushing profits up.

The corporate analysts are not entirely wrong: The real motivating force in the trend comes from consumers, who don't really care who or what produces their food so long as it's safe to eat, convenient to prepare and inexpensive. William Kendall, for one, believes he can find the middle line. The new custodians of Green & Black's are all blue-chip business types with instincts for hard promotion and competitive selling, but they also claim to be firmly committed to the principals of the counterculture. Prominent among those goals should be the commitment to give farmers a better deal. It was Kendall's people who met with the new manager of the TCGA in Toledo, the New Brunswick wood-supplier cum CUSO volunteer who had promised to turn the TCGA into a proper business.

Gregor Hargrove arrived on the scene in 2003, ten years after Craig Sams had first talked to Justino Peck and they decided to make a deal. Hargrove, in retrospect, believes the problems he encountered on his arrival were those of a company that became a victim of its own success. When Hummingbird Hershey pulled out (it's called “the exodus” in Toledo circles), only twenty thousand
pounds of cocoa were harvested in the region that season. The first shiploads for Green & Black's in 1993 were in the neighbourhood of sixty thousand pounds. The U.K. company proved to be insatiable and, five years later, farmers sold Green & Black's a half-million pounds. “And now we've had inquiries for 700,000,” says Hargrove. “If we'd ever dreamed of it, we could have provided it. We just never dreamed.” Hargrove commissioned two buffer nurseries to start producing more trees and installed an additional fifty thousand plants, but they still couldn't keep up with the demand. And that's when the men from Green & Black's started to put the heat on the farmers.

Soon after he arrived, Hargrove met with the executives from Green & Black's, who announced they were tired of the TCGA and accused the farmers of being deadbeats: “Man, these guys [the Toledo cocoa growers] think the sun rises and sets on your ass!” Hargrove replied, “That's rough talk.” But Kendall's agents said there would be no more breaks: It was time for the Toledo growers to get their act together.

There were, by now, many different kinds of Green & Black's organic bars, including milk chocolate, almond and hazelnut, but Maya Gold was the only fair trade organic product. The new executives had ambitious plans. But what the corporation could not get around wasn't the organic label but the other little logo on every bar of Maya Gold—that of the Fairtrade Foundation.

The fair trade movement began in 1988 in the Netherlands with Max Havelaar, a forward-looking activist who concluded that commodities from the developing world would always be sold for the cheapest price possible unless companies were forced to pay a premium. The uncompromising fair trade movement is touted as the last best hope for cocoa farmers worldwide—the only chance they have to shrink that growing gap between the hand that picks the bean and the hand that unwraps the candy bar. Activists in the movement have aggressively lobbied Big Chocolate to join fair trade, arguing that the stringent rules of the foundation would be
the answer to many of the cocoa companies' problems. The fair trade premiums, they insist, would pay the farmers of Africa enough that they would not be obliged to seek the cheap, or even slave, labour of children in order to meet their expenses. And it would be a great public relations coup for the companies.

The activists have also sought out opportunities to shame Big Chocolate for its record on child labour. Global Exchange, the most visible and insistent of the fair trade advocates in the United States, has a very effective program in the school system, warning young Americans that their consumption of mainstream chocolate brands means that children in other countries cannot go to school. The message is oversimplified and stark, but it has the desired effect on impressionable young minds. The
Fair Trade Chocolate Activity Book
for grades three to six is all about injustice in the production of a chocolate bar. The message couldn't be simpler nor more accurate: “Cocoa farmers are poor because they do not get paid very much for their cocoa.” Children are instructed to circle the coins that add up to twenty-five cents, the amount paid for a pound of cocoa beans. On another page, they can circle the coins that add up to eighty cents, the amount a farmer gets for a pound of beans under the fair trade system.

Global Exchange and its sister organization in Canada stage rallies and campaigns at Halloween, warning kids of the slave labour that went into their goodie bag and lobbying schools to stop selling questionable chocolate products to raise money for gym equipment. They held protest rallies outside screenings of the recently released
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
and got favourable coverage even in the conservative magazine
Forbes
.

Global Exchange has also joined the class action suit filed by the International Labor Rights Fund against Nestlé, Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill. The fair trade advocates allege that Big Chocolate has an unfair competitive advantage over fair
trade chocolate sellers since the companies are willing to use “forced child labour” to harvest their raw ingredients. The suit claims that the three transnationals have enjoyed “unjust enrichment” at the cost of fair trade chocolate manufacturers, who must spend extra money to ensure forced labour is not a part of their product.

So far, there's little chance of Big Chocolate jumping on the bandwagon of fair trade as they have for organics. Given the pressure they are exerting in the organic foods industry to decrease standards, perhaps it's just as well. Susan Smith, of the powerful Chocolate Manufacturers Association, says plainly that “fair trade is not for us.”

Gregor Hargrove isn't sure that fair trade is for him, either. While fair trade is, in theory, one of the most ethical movements of our time, in practice it generates a cumbersome bureaucracy. “I spend my life in this crap,” he declares in his Punta Gorda office, gesturing towards the mountain of paperwork necessary to satisfy the fair trade headquarters in Bonn, Germany, where international standards for fair trade are enshrined in a series of rules. Most of the fair trade agencies, especially those in Europe and the United Kingdom, register in Bonn. But for so many operations in the developing world, the fair trade administration has become just another burdensome chore.

Hargrove mocks the Bonn fair traders as pencil pushers with no roots in the real world, in particular the one in which he lives. “The administration has taken over,” says Hargrove of the technocrats. What comes out of the German offices is a mishmash that “looks excellent on their desk in the First World and looks like a Frankenstein monster by the time it hits my desk in the Third World. So what I say is that it's becoming a hell of a good deal for First-World bureaucrats and it's becoming less of a good deal for producers, and we have to pay for it.”

The fair trade levies are staggering for small operations like the TCGA. Hargrove estimates the TCGA pays twenty to twenty-five
per cent of its income in fees, including all the expenses of the apparatchiks who come over periodically to conduct inspections. “I don't know how long the list of prosperous fair trade cooperatives and associations would be, but I'm thinking it's not very long,” he says. What Hargrove worries about most is that the farmers would be incapable of completing the complex—despite being in English it is often incomprehensible—paperwork on their own. Yet the fair trade organization insists it be done. It's not that the farmers can't read, it's that no one unfamiliar with the workings of a European bureaucracy could make any sense of the documents. Hargrove hasn't identified a single member of the coop who could manage it, should he leave.

A tour of the cocoa fields around Toledo bears out what Hargrove is saying. Few of the farmers have the literacy skills required for full documentary compliance. An American Peace Corps worker spent half a day trying to explain to the farmers what “alphabetical order” means, an obsession with the hardheads in Bonn, who like information submitted to them in highly organized lists.

But mostly, according to Hargrove, the Maya don't seem amenable to change. The farmers know what they must know about farming cocoa—about the soil, the plants, the weather conditions—but their collective wisdom comes to them naturally, through instinct and practical experience. They have no knowledge of the science of organics or of the fair trade A-B-C labelling requirements, nor are they much interested in learning systems they don't really understand. All the farmers understand is that there is a market for their beans if they grow them a certain way. But there was also once a market for their beans if they grew them an entirely different way. Markets are funny like that. Growing beans without pesticides and being able to send your children to school is, of course, superior to what the farmers experienced earlier. But how long before the bubble bursts, and the fickle consumer wants something else?

Justino Peck is frustrated by the skepticism of his fellow farmers. “They need to sacrifice the time to get started, and you have to stick out the lean years,” he says. He thinks the farmers often give up too soon, or they don't tend their cocoa trees well enough to get the high yields necessary for prosperity.

Peck's face appeared in newspapers around the world a few years ago when the fair trade people presented him as a kind of ambassador of fair trade chocolate. It was reminiscent of when the missionaries and conquistadors brought Mayan natives to the Spanish court to show the monarchy what interesting human specimens the New World could produce. But Justino didn't feel used. “That's just the way of the world,” he says with a sigh.