An early start today with a thermos of Oromo coffee to keep us awake for the long drive up to Leeds for the Fairtrade Schools conference. This was in the rather splendid surroundings of the Leeds Business School, a converted Victorian grammar school.

We met up with the mighty DGH, Divine Chocolate's resident chocolatier, who ran an excellent lunchtime cookery workshop at the refectory. He was supported by special guest Carl, from the Ministry of Chocolate. They were two chocolatiers on a mission!

Over at Pa Pa Paa LIVE, the interactive webcast service we run with Comic Relief, we've got a special webcast up to celebrate International Day of the African Child on Tuesday 16th June.

We hope that it highlights the sort of aspirations young people in Africa have for their futures; free from poverty and full of opportunities.

International Day of the African Child has been celebrated on 16th June every year since the end of Apartheid in 1991. It honours the thousands of black schoolchildren who took to the streets during the Soweto Uprising of 1976 to protest about the inferior quality of their education, and draws attention to the lives of African children today.

We kicked off May 2009 with a City of London May Day event organised by Trading Visions, Justshare and the Fairtrade London Campaign.

It was a perfect sunny afternoon to fly the Fairtrade flag and we made a real statement by setting up our stands in the heart of the City – right at the steps of the Royal Exchange!

The last two months have seen two of the biggest chocolate industry players announce major ethical certification initiatives.

Cadbury's Dairy Milk bar will be Fairtrade certified in the UK and Ireland by the end of 2009, with plans to convert more of their range, and Mars are working with Rainforest Alliance to sustainably source all their cocoa by 2020, starting with Rainforest Alliance certification for the Galaxy bar in 2010.

To put these announcements in context and explore their significance, we put some questions to Mars and Cadbury, and to three external commentators...

Short film by Reuters with Divine Chocolate welcoming British confectioner Cadbury's decision to convert its biggest selling chocolate bar, Dairy Milk, to Fairtrade.

Trading Visions and Comic Relief have launched an interesting new service for schools, in collaboration with Kuapa Kokoo and Divine Chocolate, called Pa Pa Paa LIVE. It's an online video broadcasting service, delivering webcasts from a rural junior school in Ghana to classrooms across the UK.

Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO), the global Fairtrade certification umbrella body, has commissioned the first ever global consumer survey on Fairtrade. It was carried out by GlobeScan, and involved a sample size of 14,500 people in fifteen countries.

The results are encouraging reading. The survey shows that ‘active ethical consumers’ make up just over half the population (55%) in the countries surveyed. These consumers are willing to reward or punish companies that meet, or fail to meet, their expectations, and they influence others with their opinions.

Half of the public (50%) in the fifteen countries are now familiar with the Fairtrade mark and of these people, nine out of ten (91%) trust it. The survey also shows that 64% of all consumers in the surveyed countries believe that Fairtrade has strict standards, a quality that FLO says closely correlates to consumer trust. And 72% of all consumers believe independent certification is the best way to verify a product’s ethical claims.

Mars has announced that all its cocoa will be "sustainably sourced" by 2020. Mars is working with the Rainforest Alliance to certify at least some of this cocoa. The first product to bear the Rainforest Alliance mark will be Galaxy Chocolate in the UK and Ireland, beginning in 2010.

I don't know about you, but I was secretly hoping the G20 summit last week would live up to Gordon Brown's hype, surprise us all and radically re-shape the global economic system.

Next week, Gordon Brown is hosting a high profile G20 summit. The ambitious objective of the twenty-two world leaders gathering in London is to tackle the global economic crisis. Expectations are high, but few people have faith that politicians will deliver unless they are pushed to take radical progressive action.

Who controls and influences Fairtrade? And who benefits? What happens when big retailers and multinational corporations use the Fairtrade Mark? What is the next step in the evolution of the Fairtrade model of business?

Trading Visions, in collaboration with the LSE Centre for Civil Society, held a well attended public discussion debate on Tuesday 24th February 2009. The topic was 'Who Owns Fairtrade?'

Watch and listen to the panellists and the discussion, and post your own contributions.

Cadbury and the Fairtrade Foundation have announced that Cadbury's Dairy Milk chocolate bar, and its hot chocolate beverage, will become Fairtrade certified in the UK and Ireland by the autumn of 2009.

Dairy Milk is the UK's best selling bar, with 300 million of them being produced every year. The chief executive of the company, Todd Stitzer, says he plans to convert their other chocolate brands to Fairtrade "as soon as we can do it". Dairy Milk represents 20% of Cadbury's chocolate range.

Fairtrade Foundation hosted a conference today on the global food crisis, accompanied by a succinct and timely report researched by Mark Curtis.

Tens of millions of people are now suffering the effects of increased and volatile food and fuel prices, including the world's 450 million smallholder farming households, home to around two billion people. Average food prices rose 83 per cent between 2005 and 2008

The Fairtrade Foundation announced today that Fairtrade sales rose 43 percent over 2007, defying the economic downturn and reaching an estimated retail value of £700m in 2008. The number of families regularly buying ethical tea, coffee, fruit and clothes in 2008 rose by 1.3 million to 18 million.