I sincerely hope that at least some of the people who have been buying the millions of cut-price Easter eggs over the last few weeks watched Panorama on BBC1 last Wednesday.

I was hopeful that we’d see more Fairtrade chocolate eggs available this year, following the switch of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and the four-finger Kit Kat to Fairtrade.

Alas, this was not the case, and having checked in all of the local supermarkets, I eventually bought Heyford Hill Sainsbury’s entire stock of Green & Black’s Maya Fairtrade (six eggs!) and smaller Fairtrade eggs and bunnies from an Oxfam shop for my grandsons’ egg hunt.

Panorama reporter Paul Kenyon conducted a vox pop with some shoppers in a UK city centre, offering them some chocolate bars that were labelled with a logo and information guaranteeing that the bars had been produced using trafficked child labour.

Predictably, everyone said that they wouldn’t buy them, nor would they buy any other chocolate that had been similarly produced, if they knew that to be the case. Well, now we do know. The only way to convince the chocolate industry that it needs to clean up its act is to stop buying products without a proven ethical supply chain.

Fairtrade’s Harriet Lamb was stalwart in her support for their (Fairtrade’s) efforts in West Africa and pointed out that investigations by them into allegations of lapses in certified suppliers’ conditions and procedures proved that Fairtrade works. It’s not perfect, but what is?

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that chocolate will cease to be treated as a commodity (like coffee) used to generate obscene profits for a whole chain of traders, but surely the least we can do as a rich nation is to try our best to ensure that we are not indulging our seemingly insatiable desire for chocolate at the expense of impoverished, vulnerable people elsewhere.

Nick Hills Oxford