Fairtrade Fortnight is just about to start in the UK and Ireland and we're once again thinking about cocoa farmers in West Africa and how we can support them to live their best lives. I want to share a message from my friend Adelle and I hope once you hear from her you will want to help with an important project we're working on together
Our plan
We are working with partners on the ground in Ghana to deliver a syllabus that incorporates training in chocolate making to teachers and pupils. The children will learn the history of cocoa growing in Ghana, the nutritional properties, and how the pods they see growing all around them are transformed into a delicious treat sold the world over. This will be a history lesson, a geography lesson, a home economics lesson and a business studies lesson. They will connect with cocoa and chocolate, make their own delicious treat and learn how to add value to the farming life that is their legacy.
Our total budget to get the project off the ground is £10,000 which we are asking you to crowdfund with us in three stages.
Adelle's story:
This is an invitation on a journey to justice for cocoa growing communities. A journey to STAND WITH FARMERS, a journey where people are prized over their produce and the thumbprint is of more importance than the bar code. It's an invitation to support cocoa growing communities to enjoy the fruit of their labour, write and rewrite themselves into the chocolate story, change the script and own the narrative because CHOCOLATE HAS A NAME.
I was born in Ghana. A country that has the image of cocoa pods hanging from its tree clearly imprinted on its legal tender.I grew up in Tema, the home of Ghana's Cocoa Processing Company Limited but quite importantly, I also come from a lineage of incredible story tellers who are also cocoa farmers.
My grandmother Akosua Otenewaa Onyamaka the first in line, represents the many small to medium scale family owned cocoa farms across Ghana,Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Cameroon. Countries in Africa producing up to about 70% of the world's cocoa beans.
Believe me when I say, I am the cocoa story but all that was going to change the day I saw a woman. A woman in a red facemask with her friends from York Fair Trade Forum and the Fairtrade National Campaigner Committee (NCC).
When Nestle announced no longer to use Fairtrade beans in the making of its KitKat bar, they thought they were going to sneak past us but Fairtrade campaigners who are always on the alert like meerkats noticed and took a very unpopular stance. These ordinary people, most of whom looked nothing like my kinfolks, took to the streets, the highways, the byways, the subways and the alleyways of the internet and did something rather extraordinary. They amassed 285,000 people who through their signatures, marched the cyber space with one solemn declaration " I STAND WITH FARMERS". They knew that decision was going to entrench an already fortified system which did not favour farmers. They knew that cocoa farmers were going to be whitewashed, erased, deleted and omitted from the chocolate story. Farmers who should be at the core of the multi-million industry of chocolate making. Quite simply, they knew that when a people are forgotten, their humanity is lost and that was the day, the cocoa story ceased to be my story. It became a shared story, a shared history but most importantly, our shared humanity.
Most people in cocoa growing communities cannot afford the luxury of spending on a bar of chocolate. This is not accidental or incidental. It is historical, deeply structural, unfair and unjust. A system carefully designed to leave the cocoa farming communities impoverished.
You can help change that, and make sure CHOCOLATE HAS A NAME
To find out more about the project and meet some of the people involved you can come along to our fundraiser on Sunday 6 March online
If you are able to contribute please do so:
https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/chocolate-has-a-name
If you are able to share, please do so