It’s ‘Fair Trade week’ in Belgium… We are not participating.

To be clear: I have a soft spot for fair trade. In the 1990s I worked in a fair trade shop in Aachen (Weltladen, Jakobstrasse). I loved the idea. Connect consumers here with producers there, pay a fairer price, make trade more human. Pure and simple.

And as communication? It worked brilliantly. After 25+ years, everybody knows Fairtrade. The label is on your chocolate, your coffee, your bananas. And the little frog of the Rainforest Alliance – so cute. A heroic alliance standing between the rainforest and the men with chainsaws. Beautiful story.

That’s exactly the point. It’s a story. Let’s look at what actually happened on the ground, over the past quarter century.

An AI-generated image of a young boy viewed from behind, using a blade to harvest a yellow cacao pod from a tree in a plantation.
AI-generated image: A young boy harvesting cacao pods in a West African plantation.

25 years. What changed for the children?

Fairtrade International was founded in 1997. The cocoa industry signed its first commitments on child labour in 2001 (the Harkin-Engel Protocol) promising real reduction “in five years”. Those five years have been renewed ever since.

The most thorough independent study (NORC at the University of Chicago, for the US Department of Labor, based on the 2018/19 season) found that in the cocoa-growing areas of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, 45% of children in cocoa-growing households were involved in child labour : about 1.56 million children, 94% of them in hazardous work: work with machetes or toxic pesticides, while protective gear is often too expensive. The industry’s target of cutting the worst forms by 70% was officially not met.

Defenders of the labels will say the numbers improved slightly in absolute terms, from 1,8 million children in earlier industry estimates to 1.56 million. Perhaps. But when a quarter century of promises ends at “still 45% of children, and still no machete-proof definition of success”, the defence is not exactly a triumph. And, tellingly, no comparable independent study of that scale has been published since. The best data we have is already six years old, which is itself a scandal. In 2026, a supply chain this scrutinised still cannot tell us how many children are working in it today. Hmmm, or maybe they don’t want us to tell/know….

An animated time-lapse map showing the progression of deforestation across the Ivory Coast's protected forest reserves and national parks between 1990 and 2015, including impacts on chimpanzee habitats. Image courtesy of Mighty Earth, with thanks.
Time-Lapse Map of Deforestation in the Ivory Coast (1990–2015). The animation illustrates the severe loss of tree cover within protected areas and crucial chimpanzee habitats over this 25-year period. Source: Mighty Earth, with thanks.

25 years. What changed for the forest?

Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest cocoa producer, lost 30% of its forest cover in two decades (2000-2020), and over 63% since 1990 – according to satellite analyses by Mighty Earth and, in parts, the Ivorian government’s own reporting. The government itself names agricultural expansion, cocoa first among them, as a key driver.

A certification system called the Rainforest Alliance, the cute frog, has been operating there the whole time. Its certified seal has been applied to hundreds of thousands of tonnes of Ivorian cocoa a year.

Draw your own conclusion…

An illustrative slide featuring the Fairtrade International and Rainforest Alliance Certified logos in the center, surrounded by the logos of verified European corporate partners and brands, including Divine, Clipper Teas, Nestlé, Unilever, Lipton, Co-op, Greggs, Tchibo, Mars, IKEA, Edeka, Lavazza, Aldi, Lidl, Ben & Jerry’s, Tony’s Chocolonely, Costa Coffee, and Marks & Spencer, on an off-white background.

The label business is doing fine, though

Here’s the uncomfortable part (What? Even more uncomfortable?!): the labels themselves admit the demand side is shrinking, not growing.

  • Fairtrade cocoa sales in 2022 were 233,000 tonnes (only about 5% of global cocoa production) and Fairtrade itself has acknowledged “a very large oversupply of Fairtrade cocoa and a decline in demand“.
  • The Rainforest Alliance certified 2,338,000 tonnes of cocoa in 2024, but only about 1,400,000 tonnes were actually sold as certified, according to its own 2024 Cocoa Certification Data Report. Roughly a third of the certified label exists because someone paid for the certificate, not because anyone demanded it.
  • The Rainforest Alliance earns the majority of its revenue from certification fees (around 60%) and royalties paid by the companies using the logo (see its own annual reports). That’s not a scandal. It’s just a fact you should know: certification is an industry, and industries sell what their customers want to buy. What the big buyers want to buy is the communication, not necessarily the change.
Qori Warmi Cusco Peru Mb
Our bars travelled to our partners Qori Warmi in Peru. Lucky.

What we do instead

From day one, MIKE&BECKY chose a different path: transparency over labels.

Our cacao isn’t “certified”. It has a name and address. Three examples: 

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You can ask us where the beans come from, who grew them, who we paid, and how much. You can ask what we don’t know yet, too.

That’s more laboursome and less comfortable than a frog on a wrapper. Sure.

But, transparency means you can check us any time.

A label means you trust a paid-for logo.

The first is accountability. The second is marketing.

We think 25 years of rising child labour and shrinking forests while the labels grew bigger is enough evidence that the logo doesn’t work.

The solution is bringing farmers, plantations and cooperatives out of the shadows, joining the brands in the spotlight: names, addresses, practices. Nothing to hide. 

Here is a way how that could look like: ORTO

So: enjoy the Fair Trade Week. We won’t be taking part.
We’ll be working. As usual. In our transparent workshop in Anderlecht.
Come visit and ask us anything.

Yours chocolatey,

Björn