Season 1

There's race to the bottom for cheaper ingredients, cheaper certification labels—cheaper everything just to feed corporate profits. In our final episode of the season, we speak with Charity Ryerson of Corporate Accountability Lab and explore a few ways we can raise the costs of business as usual.

Are corporations above the law? Do money and power trump human rights? This episode, we speak with Terry Collingsworth, the attorney representing six people who were forced into child labor in Nestlé and Cargill’s cocoa supply chains in the U.S. Supreme Court.

After Nestlé dropped Fairtrade certification on its UK KitKat bar, the news could have gotten swept under the rug. Joanna Pollard, the coordinator of Fairtrade Yorkshire, refused to let that happen. This episode, we learn how her organizing efforts brought Nestle to the negotiating table.

Grocery store shelves have dozens of sustainable and ethical labels—but do any of them really make a difference? Merling Preza, a pillar of the fair trade movement, brings the ingredients of a KitKat bar back to the shelf to look at what wraps them all together: the label on the outside.

Robin Averbeck of Rainforest Action Network (RAN) shares how the industrial food system turned palm oil into one of the leading global drivers of deforestation. In Ghana, Safianu Moro of Serendipalm describes a totally different model, where small-scale palm oil farmers are regenerating the land.

Karen Mapasua of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) helps us untangle sugar’s bitter history on the island of Fiji. In Paraguay, Andres Gonzales of Manduvira cooperative shares how fair trade sugarcane farmers are turning the global sugar industry on its head.

Fortin Bley and Franck Koman from the Ivorian Fair Trade Network (IFTN) expose Nestle’s misleading marketing claims and the current challenges faced by cocoa farmers. And award-winning author, Simran Sethi, describes the true cost of an industry that bills cocoa as an “affordable luxury.”

Introducing: For a Better World, a new podcast by Fair World Project about fair trade and the farmer and worker-led movements that are fighting for equitable food and farming systems.