Cocoa Life will appear on the entire range of Cadbury Dairy Milk milk chocolate products, including bars and smaller products such as Freddo.

Cadbury has started a promotional push on its self-proclaimed "ethical" chocolate label Cocoa Life, including asking selected journalists to go with it to Africa to visit cocoa plantations of its choosing.

Consumers will see more of the little green logo on the front of Cadbury's chocolate, owned by giant processed food conglomerate Mondelez.

The Cocoa Life label replaces the Fairtrade label that used to be on the front of its Dairy Milk bars, but they are not the same, and there is concern the move could cause confusion among chocolate buyers.

​Mondelez has defended the controversial move to leave the Fairtrade system, claiming it never pulled out of Fairtrade and it was an "evolution" of the partnership.

SUPPLIED Mondelez International associate director of chocolate Paul Chatfield says Cocoa Life is an evolution of Cadbury's partnership with Fairtrade.

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Cocoa Life will appear on the entire range of Cadbury Dairy Milk milk chocolate products.

But Fairtrade Australia and NZ chief executive Molly Harriss Olson said Mondelez' Cocoa Life programme was not the same as Fairtrade.

Fair trade is trade between companies in developed countries and producers in developing countries in which fair prices are paid to the producers, and there is a hard ban on any exploitative forced labour and child labour.

For consumers, the difference between the Cocoa Life and Fairtrade may be hard to understand. Neither Fairtrade nor Mondelez have published a comparison of Fairtrade and Cocoa Life.

But Modelez said Cocoa Life was going "beyond" the supply chain and improving the lives of their cocoa farmers in Ghana, Cote D'Ivore and Indonesia, through education, providing clean water and ensuring gender equality.

SUPPLIED Mondelez International's Paul Chatfield says Cocoa Life is an evolution of Cadbury's partnership with Fairtrade.

Fairtrade continued to be a part of Cocoa Life as an independent auditor of the programme.

However, Cocoa Life's standards of ethical practice have been written by Mondelez, not Fairtrade, which is part-governed by cocoa farmers themselves.

Olson said while Cadbury was intending to massively increase its support for Cocoa Life, it was not going to be as rigorous and clear as Fairtrade.

"Fairtrade has transparent and robust standards in our supply chains. Our standards are developed by high level expert advisory committees and those standards are published internationally.

"That's very different for a company – they may or may not have external advisors and publish standards publicly. Cadbury's ambition is to have a greater impact but when schemes develop their own programmes, it's not the same [as Fairtrade]," she said.

Trade Aid chief executive Geoff White said Mondelez moving outside of a recognised auditing programme was a "terrible step back".

SUPPLIED Marketing lecturer at Auckland University Mike Lee says transparency is key for businesses wanting to ensure they're production was ethical.

"They would never dream to do it on the reporting of their financials so why do they think they can get away with reporting on their environmental concerns?" White said.

Marketing lecturer at Auckland University Mike Lee doubted ordinary consumers could understand the difference between competing "ethical" labels.

"The only way to have that level of transparency is to have entities beyond the corporation to have the access to some sort of power or it's all happening behind closed doors," Lee said.

"If everyone starts doing their own thing, you have this massive influx of information and seriously, do they think consumers are going to look into the processes of every fair trade scheme of companies? It just gets too hard and people start tuning out," Lee said.

CHILD LABOUR GUARANTEE

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), one fifth of African children work as labourers, most in the agriculture sector.

Mondelez has set up a US$400 million (NZ$500m) fund to invest into Cocoa Life. Some has been used to set up child labour "protection committees" in the farmers' communities, and has invested in child labour "education" programmes.

But the language of the 2017 Cocoa Life Progress Report is "empowering", "enriching", "educating" and "tackling" the root causes of the "complex problem" of child labour.

The Cocoa Life log (left) has replaced the Fairtrade logo in the new roll out.

By the end of 2017, the Cocoa Life programme was in 1085 communities, the report said. Modelez had established "Child Protection Committees" in 516 of them, "building on our holistic interventions to tackle the root causes of child labour".

"Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation Systems (CLMRS) are operational in 137 of these communities," the report said.

Trade Aid's Fairtrade-compliant supply chain aimed to totally exclude exploitative labour.

"You can't say 100 per cent anything, it's foolish to say something is 100 per cent pure," White said, but added: "We would say we are extremely confident there is no child labour or child slavery is in our supply chain."

White said child labour in the cocoa industry in West Africa was result of a decrease in the global price of cocoa leaving farmers unable to pay their workers.

Cadbury guaranteed that workers were not worse off than they were under the Fairtrade programme, Mondelez said.

SUPPLIED Cocoa Life claims to support farmers through farming, community, youth, livelihoods and environment.

* Stuff declined Mondelez's offer to take a journalist to visit African cocoa communities it had selected.