Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to be speaking in the Main Committee today on the issue of Fair Trade chocolate. I wrote to the Prime Minister on 10 April about an issue that is burning in my electorate and across the world, particularly for those people who have supported the Millennium Development Goals and are running a campaign called Don’t Trade Lives: What is the Real Cost of Chocolate? Reverend Tim Costello and World Vision have been playing a role internationally in trying to highlight the appalling situation of child slave labour that is producing cocoa in countries such as the Ivory Coast and Ghana, which produce 70 per cent of the world’s cocoa. They do not get paid at a fair price for the cocoa. As a consequence, those people who produce the cocoa are forced to use child slave labour.

World Vision, on their donttradelives.com.au website, say that approximately 70 per cent of the cocoa beans used to make chocolate around the world come from the Ivory Coast and Ghana, that it is intensive, backbreaking work, that cocoa prices have been declining largely because of corruption and poor economic planning and that criminal networks have been caught moving children across regional and international borders to work on cocoa farms. There is evidence that children as young as six are being forced to work 80 to 100 hours a week, enduring beatings and malnutrition. There are hundreds of thousands of children working on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast and Ghana who never even get the opportunity to consider going to school. Reverend Tim Costello has visited some of those people.

I wrote to the Prime Minister on 10 April asking that the government consider using its purchasing power to send a very important message to the confectionary manufacturers of the world but particularly those in Australia. It would be a serious step if the government required that the only chocolate sold in vending machines in government departments across Australia was Fair Trade chocolate. That is not hard to do. I am going to ask for permission to table a list of guilt-free chocolates, as the Don’t Trade Lives website call them, which would be available to be stocked in vending machines. Certainly all new vending machines and all new contracts for vending machines could require Fair Trade chocolate. It would send a real message across the world. The purchasing power here in Australia has the capacity to make changes. It would have a ripple effect right across the world. When people go to vending machines and ask where their usual chocolate is, they will be told, ‘You have to purchase Fair Trade chocolate.’ That would get the issue being talked about around the water coolers and over the barbeques on weekends. It is a small change but an important one. I ask leave to table this list.

Leave granted.