KEEPING IN WITH GOVERNMENT

KitKat, the Nestlé company, buys its cacao from Côte D’Ivoire. For the last decade, an agreement between Nestlé and the Fairtrade Foundation has ensured that 16,000 small cocoa farmers have reaped many more benefits than the open market would have brought.

In October 2020, Nestlé will be replacing the Fairtrade Foundation with the Rainforest Alliance. Why? During the decade the agreement has been in place, Nestlé, the Fairtrade Foundation and the farmers all professed themselves happy with arrangements. So, why change then? 

The suspicion must be that Nestlé is cutting costs, but Nestlé insists that its new arrangements will cost just as much and that they will also benefit farmers just as much. Most of its other products are sourced through the Rainforest Alliance and there will be some simplification. Even so, as Baby Milk Action, no friends of Nestlé, points out, severing links with Fairtrade is poor public relations.

So why the switch? It may be relevant that the Rainforest Alliance espouses a market-oriented approach to helping suppliers, who are promised minimum working standards in return for producing a better product for Nestlé: 

“Rainforest Alliance certification helps farmers produce better crops, adapt to climate change, increase their productivity, and reduce costs. These benefits provide companies with a steady and secured supply of certified products”, says the Rainforest Alliance.

Similarly perhaps, the UK government has just incorporated its department for international development into its foreign office in the belief that trade makes a more effective contribution to development than aid on its own. Free-market thinking is in the air and Fairtrade is seen as a barrier to free trade – and an obstacle to big business anxious to cosy up to neoliberal governments. 

 

The Fairtrade mission differs from that of the Rainforest alliance. Fairtrade guarantees cocoa farmers a minimum price for their cocoa (rather than a minimum wage) and a Fairtrade premium of £240 a ton that goes direct to the farmers to be spent as they see fit. It is currently being spent on Covid-19 prevention measures. The Rainforest Alliance also pays farmers a premium, but the cacao farmers of Côte D’Ivoire will receive only £420,000 in Rainforest Alliance premium next year. They would have received £1.68 million in Fairtrade premium.

 

Sainsbury’s replaced its Fairtrade tea in 2017 in favour of its own arrangements for certification and ethical treatment of workers. In 2018, Tesco moved its tea and coffee from Fairtrade to the Rainforest Alliance. Popular concern about ethical working conditions in the poorest parts of the world has grown and spread to non-food goods, and such companies as Costa, McDonald’s, Unilever and M&S have responded, but with their own schemes rather than Fairtrade. 

 

It is hard not to see these companies as cutting costs while still exploiting the Fairtrade reputation. At the same time, they are adjusting to the neoliberal agenda of many governments in the developed world, and certainly the UK government. For example, sugar farmers in Malawi and Fiji will lose £2 million in Fairtrade premium annually from 2021 when Nestlé switches its custom to UK beet farmers in order, according to Nestlé, to” focus on increasing local agricultural sources where possible”.

Sign Joana Pollard's petition, if you are so inclined, at

 
https://www.change.org/p/ulf-mark-schneider-nestle-global-ceo-keep-kitkat-fairtrade?recruiter=44864756&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_initial&utm_term=b24d0d6a103d4ed282e45fc24d0e4d3b&recruited_by_id=c9c28f80-7481-0130-207e-3c764e044346