First they came for the coffee beans. Now, it’s the cocoa beans. Global Exchange and other “fair trade” activists are taking on candy, targeting Mars, Hershey, See’s, and other chocolate-makers. “The group has moved onto chocolate from coffee,” having muscled Starbucks into shelling out more for “politically correct” coffee beans.
The “fair traders” are only fair to “approved distributors” like Peace Coffee, a for-profit outfit run by the heads of the tax-exempt Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, funded by the Joyce Foundation and the Foundation for Deep Ecology. (Click here for yesterday’s story on the Joyce Foundation.) Peace Coffee’s beans go for $9.50 per pound, about twice the retail price consumers pay today. Could a $2.00 candy bar be far behind?
