by Carol Off
In 2002, William Kendall wanted more capital to run Green & Black’s, so he made a deal with a new shareholder. Cadbury Schweppes bought five per cent of the company in its bid to move into the lucrative market of the conscientious consumer. The idealists who invented organics and fair trade accused Kendall of selling out, but he argues it was just good business. Craig Sams defended the deal as well: “We are learning a lot from them about the cacao market … and they are learning a lot from us about organics, fair trade and corporate responsibility. I suppose, indeed I hope, it’s inevitable that their involvement will deepen and lead to control, but in that process we will have engineered a sort of reverse takeover, on a cultural level, of the world’s largest confection company.”
It was part of a trend. The consumer wouldn’t know by looking at the labels that some of the most popular brands of organics in the alternative food stores are now owned by transnationals. Mars, Inc. has acquired Seeds of Change, which first came on the U.S. market in the late 1980s with the stated objective “to restore biodiversity and revolutionize the way we think about food.” Seeds of Change owners said much the same thing as Craig Sams when they were questioned about “selling out”: They needed the cash. The alternative press buzzed with talk of the merger—a company that built its reputation on the importance of providing proper nutrition to American families is now the property of a junk food purveyor.
But Seeds of Change is hardly alone. Heinz Corporation owns a long list of organic products with names that evoke the “small is beautiful” mantra of the movement: Imagine Rice Dream, Health Valley, Walnut Acres, ShariAnn’s and Mountain Sun—all companies bought in a sweep when Heinz acquired Arrowhead Mills. Unilever owns the counterculture ice cream line Ben & Jerry’s; Coca-Cola owns the fruit juice and granola bar company Odwalla; Tyson Foods, the controversial U.S. meatpacking enterprise with a reputation for having the worst working conditions in the slaughterhouse business, owns Nature’s Farm Organic, the marketers of chickens that apparently enjoyed life before they became dinner.
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 effec
t 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.
In early 2005, the multinational corporation Cadbury Schweppes bought controlling interest of Green & Blacks. William Kendall told the London’s Financial Times that the company “stands to make a lot of money for our shareholder and plant a fertile seed in a larger company to carry on fair trade.” But he was quickly put on the defensive when customers bombarded Green & Blacks with complaints that the organization was selling out. Kendall issued a statement on the company’s website: “We do not have time for prejudice at Green & Blacks and this includes a prejudice that all big companies are bad.”
For Gregor Hargrove, the jury is still out. When he heard the news of the take-over, the New Brunswicker thought of home, where the McCains were also very acquisitive, and Hargrove remembered “what happens when big companies take over little ones.” But his first experience of working for a large multinational is that he feels he has more room to manoeuvre. “There’s a certain comfort in having a big company behind us,” says Hargrove, warily. But then again, he adds, maybe Cadbury has learned a few things over the past hundred years.
Epilogue
IN ALL FAIRNESS
We want a five cent chocolate bar;
Eight cents is going too darn far;
We want a five cent chocolate bar,
We want a five cent bar.
—SONG COMPOSED BY THE CHILDREN OF THE CHOCOLATE PROTEST OF 1947
THE CHOCOLATE “CRUSADE” IN THE SPRING OF 1947 WAS one of the strangest strikes of the twentieth century in Canada—or anywhere, really. It began as a proud outburst of youthful assertion, emblematic of new freedoms recently won on the battlefield, a call for justice and fairness. The enthusiasm of a handful of children on Vancouver Island quickly spread from one end of the country to the other. Parades of young people snaked their way through city streets in Regina, Ottawa and Quebec City; crowds of youngsters carried homemade placards throughout the Maritimes; and a large, noisy mob stormed the provincial legislature in Victoria.
The campaign was a demand that the world be a fairer place for children—at least for those privileged enough to enjoy chocolate. The big chocolate bar companies had jacked up their prices to eight cents for a bar of candy. Young people throughout Canada thought it should remain at five cents, as Milton Hershey in the United States and the Ganong Brothers of New Brunswick had done in Canada. The kids took
to the streets to protest what they regarded as unfair.
Crispy Crunch, Jersey Milk, Aero Bar, Coffee Crisp, O Henry!, Sweet Marie, Burnt Almond and Malted Milk were among the delights one could buy for a nickel in Canada and the United States during the 1930s and early ’40s. But according to manufacturers, the price was artificially low. The end of wartime wage and price controls meant chocolate bar companies would have to pay more than twice the price for their cocoa beans and substantially more for labour—wages had almost doubled since the 1930s. Those added expenses would have to be passed on to the customer. Everything was now increasing in price and—with the exception of a very few outspoken housewives’ consumer groups—people grudgingly accepted inflation as the side effect of a normalizing economy. But the children didn’t see it that way.
The crusade started in sleepy Ladysmith and neighbouring Chemainus on Vancouver Island where young Bruce Saunders, Parker Williams, Bert Gisborne and Gerald Williams rallied their friends to picket a local ice cream parlour called the Wigwam, their common source of penny candy and chocolate bars. News of the protest inspired other children on the island to launch their own campaign, and within days dozens of them swarmed the British Columbia Legislature, shouting “Bring Back Our Nickel Bar” and shutting down House business for part of the day.