Awarded the CDM

An old marketing campaign for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate bars went: ‘Award yourself the CDM.’
Innocuous enough, except that CDM might just as well have stood for ‘Children Damaged for Merchandise’ - the cocoa industry being among the worst offenders for exploiting trafficked children.
Children are still routinely abducted from home or kidnapped from the streets, with poor and vulnerable children prime targets, and forced to work long hours on the cocoa plantations for little or no pay.
Fairtrade chocolate is therefore about far more than ensuring a fair price for local producers: it is about banning child slavery in the chocolate industry.
Cadbury’s has now announced that its most popular chocolate bar - the CDM - has gone Fairtrade.
The news is fantastic and hopefully will mean that children who have been secreted on plantations can be traced and returned to their families, or accommodated and educated in places where they are finally allowed to have a childhood.
Working to banish child exploitation (and, indirectly, child trafficking to feed the demand) on plantations where it has been normal practice for so long, has taken time, resources and effort on the part of Cadbury’s and they should indeed be awarded a CDM for persevering.
And of course what can be achieved for one chocolate bar can be achieved for all its other chocolate products.
And what can be achieved by one chocolate manufacturer can be achieved equally by all the others.
It would be great if our next generation of chocolate-munching schoolchildren were horrified to learn about the bad old days when chocolate was confected out of the misery of stolen children.
Because by then, we hope, all chocolate will be Fairtrade.