Hot Cocoa

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While demand for fair-trade chocolate has certainly grown in the past several years -- witness the overwhelming success of fair-trade and organic chocolate companies like Dagoba, Endangered Species Chocolate Co., Rapunzel, and Green & Black's, for example -- it still represents only 1 percent of the chocolate market. Worse, large fair-trade cooperatives like Kuapa Kokoo in Ghana sell only 3 percent of their stock at fair-trade prices because they can't find enough buyers.

The real challenge, say many advocates, is to get the big companies to buy into the fair-trade ideology. International human rights organization Global Exchange, for example, has launched a campaign to persuade Mars to buy at least 5 percent of its cacao beans from fair-trade-certified collectives.

"Larger companies might say they cannot find enough fair-trade cocoa for their needs, but that argument doesn't hold up to scrutiny," says Equal Exchange's North. Companies "have to at least buy what's already available on the fair-trade market before they try to cite supply constraints as an obstacle. Further, as any free-market businessperson or economist will tell you, if the demand exists, then the supply will grow to meet it. If more chocolate companies would start buying fair-trade cocoa, then the fair-trade farmer cooperatives could grow, too, for example by adding more farmer members from surrounding communities."

Of course, the quickest way to a corporation's heart is through its consumers. Perhaps the best way to inspire change is not through guilt (ˆ la novelist Barbara Kingsolver's famous declaration that a cup of coffee "doesn't taste so good when you think about what died going into it"), but simply to create a candy bar that tastes good.

"In the end, you can't tell people their mouth is wrong or stupid or unsophisticated," says Steve Almond, author of the recent book Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (Algonquin, 2004). "'Cuz people eat what they eat." Frederick Schilling, the 34-year-old founder of Ashland, Oregon-based Dagoba, which sells fair-trade and organic chocolate, agrees.

"I believe in fair trade, but the thing is, the chocolate has to taste good; otherwise people are not going to buy it," Schilling says. "So if you have high quality and fair trade, everyone wins: The consumers are happy, the farmers are happy, and the manufacturers are happy."

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