As Halloween approaches, avoid candy made by child slaves...

[antigone382]

The following article gives a good run-down of the chocolate industry, and the prevalence of child slavery on cocoa farms on the West African Coast, from which most chocolate in the world is sourced. It also provides information on the many brands and labels that you can buy instead to avoid contributing to this humanitarian crisis. These brands are more expensive...but giving children candy which is produced from the hands of other enslaved children is simply beyond my moral capacity to accept.

Chocolate: the industry’s hidden truth (and the easy stuff we can do to still enjoy it)
(http://simplemom.net/chocolate/)

In 2001, various news sources revealed that children were being used as slaves or cheap labor in West African cocoa farms, where the majority of the world’s cocoa is birthed. Lawmakers in the U.S. tried to enact laws to require change, but the farthest they got was a voluntary protocol (the Harken-Engel Protocol, to be exact), signed by heads of major chocolate companies, to ask for the stop of child labor “as a matter of urgency.”

Well, this pretty-please request was more or less ignored, and more than ten years later, there are still over a million children working on cocoa farms with little more than the torn clothes on their backs. Their hands and faces are often sliced with machete scars, evidence of the main tool they use to cut down the cocoa from trees after shimmying up the trunk (and also used to split open the cocoa pod).


Most of the children are also required to spray hazardous chemicals on the crops, where they ingest it into their lungs, and they are unable to attend school while they work, which is in violation of the International Labor Organization (ILO). Most of these children can’t read or write, they subsist on corn paste and bananas, and needless to say, they have never tasted the chocolate they help produce for our own families.

The ILO calls the cocoa industry the worst form of child labor today. And these farms, mostly in Ghana and Ivory Coast, exist because of brands like Hershey, Nestle, Mars, and Cadbury—they all purchase cocoa from these farms, are all aware of their practices, and as of today, have chosen to do little about it.

(Read more at http://simplemom.net/chocolate/)

[rhett o rick]

1. k&r thanks for posting. nm

[Squinch]

2. I had no idea.

[BrotherIvan]

3. Thanks for this message!

We are all complicit in our purchases and must do better as consumers. I actually was shocked to hear a co-worker oudly protest that she was going to buy her grandchildren as much crap as they wanted at WalMart and she didn't care if it was made by other children! Mon Dieu.

[panader0]

4. Damn, I love chocolate

Where can I get non-slave chocolate?

[politicat]

6. Look for the fair trade symbol to start.

Single origin helps. It can be expensive compared to blood chocolate, but it usually tastes as good or better.

We don't get a lot of trick or treaters, and we can't have many sweets (one of us is pushing diabetes). I give out dollar coins. Most kids love them. (Quarters work, too if you're in a high traffic area.)

[antigone382]

8. The article I linked to gives a good list of brands, and the labels that verify ethical practices.

Fair Trade certification is one guarantee, but not all good cocoa farms can afford to go through the fair trade practice. In general, if the chocolate is not sourced from the West African Coast, child slavery is not an issue. HOWEVER, it is also important to support West African that ARE being ethical, so don't avoid chocolate from Ghana, the Cote d'Ivoire, etc. entirely! Divine is a farmer-co-op based brand in Ghana that is ethical.

[madokie]

5. I'm happy to say I don't care for chocolate

Never really cared for it

[LiberalElite]

7. Thank you for this -

[antigone382]

9. kickin' for visibility...

n/t