I posted a diary way back during the Winter Solstice on how the chocolate trade is made possible through the use of child slave labor. After seeing the posting from Meteor Blades this morning on the Front Page, I figured, perhaps it’s time for part Deux, what you can do.
So, join me on the flip and just in case you need a refresher, you can read
Slaves to Chocolate or you can read what inspired me on Buzz Flash.
So, let’s look at what you can do to support Fair Trade, buy local and also remind Nestle’ and Hershey that you don’t support their practice of buying chocolate produced through the efforts of child slaves.
Supporting Fair Trade
I’m not a fan of NAFTA, CAFTA, PFTA or granting China special trade status. I know, that's no surprise to anyone who's read any of my labor series pieces, but I always feel as if I need to say it again and again.
These trade agreements are not fair to American workers and certainly aren't fair to the workers in the trade partners who often work in deplorable conditions, with few rights and for little pay. In the end, I believe that Free trade is never free and never fair. But, don’t’ take my word for it, take a look at a Public Citizen report on the 2006 election results. Here’s just a snipit
Democrats generally have coalesced in favor of trade policy reform over the past decade as President Clinton’s NAFTA, WTO and China trade deals not only failed to deliver the promised benefits, but caused real damage. The GOP "stayed the course" on a failed trade policy and conducted high-profile fights to expand a status quo most Americans reject.
The balance of power between everyday people and corporations shifted dramatically in employers’ favor when CEOs could use trade agreements’ foreign investor privileges to re-locate overseas with an array of new rights and protections in their new low-wage venues. Products made by these relocated operations were guaranteed duty-free or low-tariff re-entry to the United States. Meanwhile, at home, corporations increasingly invoked the threat of moving overseas to squash everything from wage-increase demands to unionization drives. As the threat of off-shoring has moved rapidly up the job ladder, with academic studies and even corporate consultancies projecting that tens of millions of U.S. professional and service sector jobs could be off-shored in the foreseeable future, concern about where our current trade policies are leading has expanded.
Free trade hasn’t really helped much, has it? At least not US workers. But how has it affected non-US workers in other countries?
So, what about supporting Fair Trade?
How can any of us do it on an individual level?
- Look into what Fair Trade is and how it helps communities all over the world.
- Find products that you like and look for the Fair Trade certification. Don’t see it, tell the producer you want Fair Trade certified products.
Buy Local
When I wrote the original Slaves to Chocolate Diary, lots of people contributed links to Fair Trade chocolates, local chocolatiers and organic chocolates. My favorite local chocolatier in DC is J Chocolatier. You can buy through her website or head down to Eastern Market. When I met her and had the sheer pleasure of tasting her chocolates, she did note that she isn’t at Eastern Market every weekend, but she does sell there. I found her at the Winter Market near Gallery Place in December. I can't recommend her enough.
What impressed me about J Chocolatier is that she understood my Fair Trade questions and was more than willing to not only explain how she makes her chocolates but also where the chocolate comes from, including that she buys from a company that buys from co-op farmers. From her site:
We do not use preservatives, extracts, concentrates or flavorings. We use chocolate couverture from El Rey of Venezuela and Valrhona of France. The beans from El Rey are single origin Criollo beans, the most coveted in the world. El Rey buys their beans from small farmers in Venezuela who grow their crop under the shade of the jungle canopy. El Rey is committed to biodiversity and pays their farmers premium prices for the high quality beans that they produce.
So, then I looked up the company she buys from in order to make her chocolates, I learned this from El Rey:
El Rey offers consumers gourmet chocolate made from fairly traded cacao beans direct from small and large-scale growers in Venezuela. In our business there is no extraordinary cast of middlemen, otherwise known as "coyotes", who pay the lowest price to growers. On the contrary, El Rey seeks to balance the inequities found in the conventional third world trade by having established Aprocao, which is a democratically run cooperative managed by El Rey and which pays above-market prices for its cacao beans.
Our trading partners are small growers and large who deal directly with Aprocao without intermediaries. Through Aprocao El Rey teaches growers how to manage the soil in a sustainable agricultural system promoting natural cycles without chemical pesticides or fertilizers and how to ferment each cacao harvest to earn the best price.
If you live in the DC area, consider buying locally made J Chocolatier chocolates. If you don’t live in the DC area, perhaps a comment from the Slaves to Chocolate diary can help you locate local chocolates that are either Fair Trade or Organic (and some are both):
Below is a list of Fair Trade Chocolate Companies. They have passed the screening and review of the Fair Trade Federation and Co-op America's Green Business Network:
A World Away, Atlantic Beach, FL
904/247-4411, www.aworldaway.net
Alter Eco, San Francisco, CA
415/701-1212, www.altereco-usa.com
Ananse Village, Fort Bragg, CA
877/242-4467, www.anansevillage.com
Bean North Coffee Roasting Company,
Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada
867/667-4145, www.beannorth.com
Café Humana, Seattle, WA,
866/7-HUMANA, www.cafehumana.com
Dean’s Beans, Orange, MA, 800/325-3008,
www.deansbeans.com
Divine Chocolate USA, Washington, DC,
202/332-8913, www.divinechocolateusa.com
Equal Exchange, West Bridge, MA,
774/776-7333, www.equalexchange.com
Equita, Pittsburgh, PA
412/353-0109, www.shopequita.com
Fair World Gallery, West Des Moines, IA,
515/277-7550, www.fairworldgallery.com
Fair World Marketplace, DeWitt, NY
315/446-0326, www.fairworldmarketplace.com
Global Exchange Fair Trade Store,
San Francisco, CA 800/505-4410,
store.gxonlinestore.org
Grounds for Change , Poulsbo, WA,
800/796-6820, www.groundsforchange.com
Ithaca Fine Chocolates , Ithaca, NY,
607/257-7954, www.ithacafinechocolates.com
La Siembra Cooperative, Inc., Ottowa,
Ontario, Canada, 613/235-6122,
www.cocoacamino.com
Providence Coffee, Faribault, MN,
507/412-1733, www.providencecoffee.com
SERRV International, Madison, WI,
800/423-0071, www.serrv.org/divine
Shaman Chocolates, Soquel, CA,
877/990-3337, www.shamanchocolates.com
Sweet Earth Organic Chocolates,
San Luis Obispo, CA. 805/544-7759,
www.sweetearthchocolates.com
Yachana Gourmet, Batavia, NY.
716/343-4490, www.yachanagourmet.com
Tell Them what you think about all of this
There are a lot of companies who you can register your dissatisfaction with, in fact, you can start with these:
M&M Mars and Hershey Foods Corp. are not alone. Other companies whose chocolate is almost certainly tainted with child slavery include: ADM Cocoa, Ben & Jerry's, Cadbury Ltd., Chocolates by Bernard Callebaut, Fowler's Chocolate, Godiva, Guittard Chocolate Company, Kraft, Nestle, See's Candies, The Chocolate Vault, and Toblerone. While most of these companies have issued condemnations of slavery, and expressed a great deal of moral outrage that it exists in the industry, they each have acknowledged that they use Ivory Coast cocoa and so have no grounds to ensure consumers that their products are slavery-free.
Some of these names may have now come off this list, but I couldn't locate the information about that. If you have info post it in comments.
Whatever you decide to do today, keep in mind that buying chocolate is like tossing a pebble into a river, there will always be ripples, let’s make the ripples good tidings, not bad.