ARCHBISHOP CHALLENGES CHOCOLATE TRADE

Consumers should boycott chocolate that isn’t fairly traded to help end child labour, the Archbishop of York has said. Speaking to church and community leaders in Hull to mark the work of abolitionist William Wilberforce, Dr John Sentamu cited research connecting child labour with cocoa production. According to the Stop the Traffik campaign, 12,000 trafficked children work on Ivory Coast plantations to farm 43 per cent of the world’s cocoa beans. Stop the Traffik claims that manufacturers who don’t subscriber to Fair Trade practices cannot guarantee that their chocolate is produced without child labour. The irony, The Times points out, is that most of Britain’s original chocolate makers were Quakers, who spearheaded the campaign to end slavery.

Source: The Times (31/10)