I have a confession to make.
I love chocolate.
All sorts of shapes, sizes and flavours.  Night, day, and in between.  It’s one of my favourite foods.  It is one of the things I look forward to about Easter (from a purely selfish non-spiritual perspective!) each year.
This year however, I’m feeling a little uncertain about the whole topic.
Over recent years there has been a growing movement to Fairtrade goods in some sections of our society.  Fairtrade certification recognises that suppliers of base ingredients (such as coffee, tea or cocoa beans) should be paid a fair price, to enable safe and fair working conditions.  In many parts of the world this isn’t the case, and some of our biggest household-name grocery suppliers use raw ingredients that in some cases force suppliers into almost slave-labour conditions, and help make human traffiking a widespread criminal endeavour.  As the end consumers of these products, we have to shoulder a share of the burden alongside profit-making corporations who put the products on our local supermarket shelves.
Fairtrade remains a somewhat marginal enterprise – with the vast majority of tea, coffee and chocolate sold being outside the fairtrade system (Fairtrade covers other good as well, but these are the big three).
This year our family felt it important to consider purchasing fairtrade Easter eggs as our small gifts to each other.  In our usually highly organised fashion we’ve not done anything about this until today!
What we have discovered is that fairtrade Easter eggs are not that easy to come by, and are significantly more expensive than the normal supermarket brands we have become accustomed to.
At first our response to being faced with a price two or three times that of the major brands was to say “we just can’t afford to make this choice”.  We operate on a budget, and it seemed like the prices we found force us to take the “unethical choice”.
Until we began thinking about what exactly that choice means.
For major brands to be sold at half, a third, or in some cases a quarter of the price of fairtrade endorsed Easter Eggs means that somewhere, somehow, suppliers of basic ingredients (such as cocoa) just might be getting the raw end of the deal.  Is my Easter egg putting a child in slave-labour somewhere in the world?
And all of a sudden, my supermarket brand chocolate bunny rabbit has a bitter taste.
And our desire to revisit our Easter egg purchasing habits is stronger than ever.
It might be too late for this Easter, but let me invite you to consider how you spend your Easter chocolate budget in the years ahead. Some things are more important than consuming kilograms of cheap chocolate to remember the Easter event.
For more information:  www.fairtrade.org.au and their Easter media release. Fairtrade Easter eggs are available at Oxfam stores, and some health and specialty stores (and even occasionally in your supermarket if you look carefully).
PS I know this isn’t an R/C related topic, but consider it anyway!