Time for a break from the greenwash

Are Fairtrade-certified Kit Kats good for developing world farmers, the Fairtrade movement or ethical consumers? No, they are not.

Kit Kat is a brand of Nestlé, an enormous multinational with immense power and influence. Nestlé is also the world's most boycotted business. I find it hard to imagine that it is 'doing Fairtrade' for altruistic reasons.

One of the many pernicious things about greenwash is that the meagre positives are often greatly outweighed by the downside. Namely, that trivial, irrelevant and/or inconsequential acts of 'responsibility' can disguise and, even worse, perpetuate fundamentally irresponsible activities.

Fairtrade-certified Kit Kats illustrate the problem perfectly. To produce them, Nestlé will be converting just over 1 per cent of its global cocoa purchases to fair trade. Please note, Fairtrade does not use the tagline 'guarantees a better deal for a few third world producers'.

While I am delighted for the Kavokiva co-operative farmers in the Côte d'Ivoire who will secure a contract to supply Nestlé on fair trade terms, how many people buying these 'ethical' Kit Kats will consider their impact on the millions of people locked in poverty while supplying the other 99 per cent of the cocoa Nestlé buys at 'market prices'?

Greenwash is a real menace. It makes people cynical towards all businesses that claim to be ethical, regardless of how credible those claims are. It frustrates the efforts of genuinely responsible companies to connect with like-minded consumers. And it dumbs down the issues and leads to a race to the bottom by incentivising businesses to invest in the appearance of being ethical or sustainable rather than actually operating ethically and sustainably.

Michael Solomon is founder of SEE What You Are Buying Into, a labelling scheme for companies that are open and honest about their social, environmental and ethical (SEE) practices