Fair trade chocolate is hot in Holland. Development aid organization Oxfam Novib is campaigning at full speed to ban all ‘unfair’ chocolate from supermarket shelves ahead of the holiday season. And with success; in the past two weeks several retailers have made commitments to start selling fairly traded chocolate from next year onwards. But what difference does it really make to cocoa farmers in West Africa?

For Ghanaian cocoa farmer James Adiyiah, who has been in the business since 1986, the benefits of joining fair trade cocoa cooperative Kuapa Kokoo are clear. “Before, buyers used to cheat on me. If I brought a 64 kg bag of cocoa, they would only pay me for about 54 kg, because the scales had been tempered with. When fair trade came to my society, I could afford to send my children to school. There’s no more cheating.”

Fair trade lobby
Fair trade is indeed the way forward, according to development aid organizations like Oxfam Novib. It ensures a fair income for farmers and promotes sustainable and ethical practices on the cocoa plantations. Gone are the low earnings, child labour, excessive -unprotected- use of pesticides, deforestation and loss of soil fertility.

Anticipating the traditional increase in chocolate consumption during Sinterklaas and, to a lesser extent, Christmas, Oxfam Novib mobilized over 85,500 people online to lobby for fair trade chocolate and consequently improve the lives of the estimated 10.5 million people West-Africans who work on cocoa farms.

Shops that mostly sell unfair chocolate, were listed on the internet with a picture of a paint-sprayed façade. An ‘army’ of ethical consumers invaded real-life stores to count unfair chocolate letters and to lobby with the store management to start selling fair trade chocolate.

Revenues gobbled up
There’s a reason why they picked Holland as their prime battlefield. With a share of 14 per cent of the world market, the Netherlands are the biggest chocolate importing and processing country in the world. More than half of all Dutch food imports from Africa, worth a staggering 2.2 billion euros, consists of cocoa.

But, warns Oxfam Novib director Adrie Papma, cocoa farmers don’t see much of it. “Intermediaries take most of the revenues. And although supermarkets make profits of up to 50% per sold chocolate bar, the average cocoa farmer only sees 3 cents of every chocolate euro sold.”

‘Marketing tool’
FairTrade should put an end to all this. But of course the label itself won't solve everything that's wrong in the cocoa industry. The EU has slapped a hefty 43-percent import tariff on chocolate to discourage farmers and companies from exporting processed cocoa. Until that changes, FairTrade cocoa may be the best option many farmers have.