The REAL cost of your Valentines Day Chocolate

For the last few years around Valentines Day there has been a concerted effort by organizations and some in the media to educate consumers about chocolate and how it is a crop that is notoriously harvested by child labor as well as child slave labor. 

Over 40 % of all chocolate produced in  the world is grown in one country - the Ivory Coast and 70% is grown in West Africa. The cocoa bean is actually enclosed in a large pod with a sweet pulp. The pod grows on trees and is harvested by whacking the trees with machetes. The pod is then opened with a machete and the beans are separated from the pod and dried before bagging. Child labor is used to harvest and open the pods, spread the beans out to dry and bagging the beans. Children involved in the harvesting of the pods are often injured by the machetes that they use.  Most cocoa is produced on small plantations who then sell their beans to a middle man that collects the beans and carries them to large companies. They then ship the beans to their chocolate factories in the US and Europe. These large companies know that the beans are produced by forced and slave labor, but claim that they are not responsible. Under public outcry they have in the past come up with plans to try to decrease child labor violations, but have not done the one thing that would allow farmers to prosper which is to pay more for the crop. 

When you buy chocolate from a company that is not involved in buying fairly traded cocoa there is a good chance that a portion of it was produced by child slave labor. Below are some companies that produce fairly traded chocolate - Most can be found at Whole Foods or other Health Food stores. Trader Joe's also carries their own fairly traded chocolate bars.

Equal Exchange - http://www.equalexchange.coop/

Sweet Earth - http://www.sweetearthchocolates.com/

Devine - http://www.divinechocolateusa.com/

Green and Black's Maya Gold Chocolate bars are made from fairly traded cocoa beans. Every time you buy a fairly traded chocolate bar you are voting with your dollars for just and good labor practices.

For more information on the problem of slave labor and trafficking among cocoa producers please check out the following web sites;

http://vision.ucsd.edu/~kbranson/stopchocolateslavery/main.html

http://www.anti-slaverysociety.addr.com/chocolates1.htm

http://www.laborrights.org/files/ChocolateScorecard09.pdf

Child Slavery

When I started researching slavery one thing I quickly noticed was that many of those enslaved are children. All over the world children are trapped in the most dire of circumstances, taken advantage of due to their inability to defend themselves. Hideous unspeakable crimes are committed against these defenseless little ones and the world is just beginning to wake up to the scope and depth of their pain.

 In India and Pakistan children as young as five are taken from their poor, illiterate parents and through either out right kidnapping or subterfuge they are moved hundreds of miles away to work up to 15 hours a day at rug looms weaving wool oriental carpets. Many times the children are fed once a day and sleep under their looms. As time goes on these children suffer from wool dust in their lungs, on their skin and in their eyes as well as malnutrition. They are often beaten for mistakes.  

 In India, Thailand and other Asian countries girls as young as ten are kidnapped or sold by their parents into a sex trade market that uses religious ideas along with violence and economic pressure to keep girls in the trade, . Many of these children are made to "service" multiple customers a night. When they either become HIV positive or become too old many are then literally discarded like rubbish on the streets, others become the madams and slave owners of the next generation.

Many other countries turn a blind year to child slavery in cotton production, the garment industry, mining, cocoa, farming, domestic service, fishing and even soccer ball production.

http://www.time.com/time/asia/features/slavery/cover.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/this_world/6458377.stm

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28415693/