WHEN Christian Aid heard, in 1998, that a co-operative of cocoa
farmers in Ghana wanted to set up their own chocolate company, the
charity could not have envisaged that Divine Chocolate would go on
to become a business that has an annual turnover of £8.2
million.
Celebrating its 15th anniversary during Fairtrade Fortnight,
which runs from 25 February until 10 March, Divine Chocolate is the
first Fairtrade chocolate bar aimed at the mass market to be
launched in the UK. The company is 45 per cent owned by
farmers.
On Tuesday, the managing director of Divine Chocolate, Sophi
Tranchell, said: "When I first took up the job, it was an
insurmountable task we had taken on to launch it into the very
competitive market in the UK. Christian Aid has been a
fantastically practical group of people. The way they have educated
their supporters means that they have a really nice, quiet
confidence."
In the early days, in Christian Aid's campaign Stock the Choc,
supporters handed postcards to retailers to persuade them to buy
Divine. Today, Divine Chocolate has a turnover of more than $4.5
million in the United States, and exports to Scandinavia and the
Netherlands.
On Monday, the Fairtrade Foundation launched a new campaign
calling for support for smallholder farmers. The report
Powering up Smallholder Farmers to Make Food Fair warns
that the global food system is failing these farmers, who produce
70 per cent of the world's food. Many are "trapped in a cycle of
poverty, exacerbated by decades of price volatility,
under-investment in agriculture, and now global inflationary prices
for food and farm inputs and the impact of climate change", it
says.
The campaign launches a five-point agenda for action, and calls
on the Prime Minister, who is hosting the G8 summit in June, to put
smallholder farmers "into the heart of government's trade
policy".
The charity has also launched a petition on its website, where
supporters can turn themselves into a "personalised paper person".
The foldable "mini-marchers" will be displayed on Monday at a
demonstration in Parliament Square.
The Foundation estimates that sales of Fairtrade products are
in-creasing annually by 12 per cent in the UK.