Cadbury will Produce Fairtrade Chocolate

This week Cadbury announced a timeline for its Australian Cadbury Dairy Milk range to be certified Fairtrade.  They have committed to having over 60% of their product range guaranteed free of trafficked or exploitative child labour, as well as offering cocoa producers fair minimum wages for their produce, by early 2010.

This is a major step forward in eliminating cruel and exploitative child labour from the global cocoa industry.

Compassion and groups like Stop the Traffik have been in dialogue with Cadbury over this issue for some time.  They ultimately want to see 100% of the cocoa sold in Australian chocolate products certified as Fairtrade, but are very pleased with the progress.

This follows similar moves in Ireland and the UK, where Fairtrade Cadbury products have hit supermarket shelves in recent weeks.

When Australian and New Zealand Cadbury Dairy Milk products become Fairtrade in early 2010, the combined global sales will quadruple the amount of Fairtrade cocoa sales from Ghana, from 5,000 tonnes in 2008 to 20,000 tonnes in 2010.