Focus on business ethics - The odds in the cocoa market are stacked against developing-world farmers. Barbara Gunnell reports on how you can help get them a better deal

The news about chocolate just gets better and better. The British have always known it was good stuff, and eat more per capita than any other nation. Then scientists confirmed that this food of the gods also made you happy (as the Mayans obviously knew), having the ability to promote the production of seretonin in the brain. Other claims include its aphrodisiac qualities and, last month, we learnt that this cheap, tasty happy-pill also has magical health properties promising well-being into a ripe old age.

Great news for cocoa growers, then? Unfortunately not. On 1 February, the price of cocoa beans reached its lowest point since 1971, fetching $790.67 a tonne. Cocoa prices have followed a boom-and-bust cycle over the past 30 years, with a high in the late 1970s and a slump in the early 1990s. After a slight recovery, 1999 saw a dramatic fall: farmers' prices were cut by half in one year. Today's price stands at around half the median price of the past three decades. Many growers face ruin. In west Africa, particularly Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, up to 90 per cent of farmers are dependent upon cocoa.

Unlike tea and coffee, cocoa has not traditionally been a plantation crop. It tends to be grown by small, independent farmers and sold on to bigger dealers. Despite the considerable risks, cocoa remains, for many, the least bad option as the only alternative to subsistence farming. Like coffee, a cocoa plant takes five years to bear fruit - so farmers cannot adapt quickly enough to take advantage of high prices or protect themselves against slumps.

But the big international traders do well out of fluctuations. In fact, the greater the movement in prices, the greater the profits to be made. And while growers are praying for higher prices, the big dealers make sure that they amass sufficient stocks at low prices to draw on when prices rise. There are few good years for farmers.

This has not deterred the "international community" from sniffing out signs of lax economic practices that might feather-bed and protect the farmer. Following the usual arm-twisting by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the government of Ghana, for example, has been forced to devalue the cedi and withdraw subsidies from farmers for pesticides and other farm inputs. As in many developing countries, Ghana's cocoa growers have become organic by default. Like organic farmers, they suffer reduced yields; but, unlike organic farmers, the vast majority do not receive an organic price premium.

Britain is a major end-buyer of cocoa and the total UK chocolate market is worth about £3.7 billion a year, that is £62.64 per person. A family of four will spend, on average, £250 a year on chocolate. This, by coincidence, was the average income of a small farmer in Ghana in 1999. However, that family's £250 has to cover food, clothes, school fees, fuel, soap and so on. When the price falls, as it just has, the luxuries have to go. That will probably be the school fees. When the price falls too low for the farmers to maintain production, replace vital equipment and inputs, they may sell their farms and leave for the cities.

However, none of this should put you off eating chocolate. In fact, eating more chocolate may be the best thing you can do. For more than 15 years, an international group has been working to establish a fair trade ethic covering basic commodities such as tea, coffee and cocoa. In Britain, the Fairtrade Foundation has the backing of several charities, including Oxfam, Cafod, the World Development Movement and the Women's Institute. It has been particularly successful in promoting Fairtrade coffee - now widely available in supermarkets and the only coffee drunk in the Commons and the Scottish Parliament.

The extra pennies that a fairly traded bar of chocolate costs buy quite a lot. Fairtrade production conditions stipulate that farmers and workers have the right to participate in co-operatives or trade unions and to have decent wages, housing and health and safety standards. They also ban child and forced labour and back environmental sustainability.

In terms of financial aid to cocoa growers, Fairtrade terms of trading guarantee stable prices that are guaranteed to cover production costs; contracts that allow long-term planning; and social "premiums" that allow producer organisations to improve living and working conditions.

It sounds Utopian, but fairly traded products sold in Britain currently provide a better standard of living for more than 100,000 farmers and workers throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia. The market in Britain is expanding and a MORI poll in January 1999 revealed that 68 per cent of those questioned would like the chance to buy Fairtrade products. That opportunity is increasingly available as major supermarkets increase their stocks of fairly traded goods, including a variety of different chocolate products.

So here's the choice: write a stiff letter to the IMF and World Trade Organisation about the injustices of the macroeconomic order, or buy a bar of chocolate. In addition to instant gratification, health and longevity, the right brand could make you feel really smug.

Fairtrade Fortnight takes place on 6-19 March

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