The Bitter Truth about Chocolate

Here’s an easy way to end to even the most compelling chocolate craving:

Most of the chocolate we eat comes as a direct result of child slavery in the Ivory Coast.

I just about threw up my breakfast when I learned this on a CNN report a few days ago.  In it they showed a ten year old boy forced to harvest cocoa beans as a slave.  He has never even tasted chocolate.  He dreams of attending school one day.  Apparently the Ivory Coast has been tricking, kidnapping and forcing children into slave labor under brutal conditions for years.  This came to light in 2000.  By 2002 a coalition formed to improve their labor practices.  Ten years later, lo and behold, not much has changed.  Enough!

I don’t care about improvements.  This practice must be abolished immediately!

As a fellow human being and as a mother, I am asking you to join me in ending this practice once and for all.  It may seem too big and too far away, but if we join together in taking five simple steps, we will put an end to this.

1.  Don’t look away and don’t forget. 

It is so easy to put these horrifying thoughts out of our minds, but we do not have the right to do that.  When any human being, particulary children, are suffering we must allow our own hearts to hurt a bit.  We must allow ourselves to feel a drop of their pain.  We must never give ourselves a pass because it’s just too much to handle.  It is too much.  That is the burden of all humanity until we end slavery.

Much more information can be found at slavefreechocolate.org.  I am just beginning to join this movement, please learn from others who know more.

2.  Boycott all chocolate that is not marked Fair Trade! 

Cocoa farmers and chocolate companies have had time to fix this problem.  Their solution was to sweep it under the rug.  But what they swept was not dirt, but the very real lives of very real children.  Statistics I’ve seen have placed the Ivory Coast’s cocoa production at 42% to 80% of the world’s chocolate, so do not consume a morsel of a non-fair trade brand.  Remember how incredibly unfair this trade really is.  That makes conventional chocolate downright inedible.

Here is a link to Fair Trade Brands.

I have started a facebook page called Boycott Chocolate for Valentine’s Day.  Please like it and share it.  I will make another page for each and every chocolate holiday until there is no longer a need to boycott.  Our lives cannot be celebrated courtesy of the blood of children.

3.  Spread the word.

Tell a coworker with a chocolate dish on her desk about this.  Tell restaurants about this when you refuse to order their chocolate confections.  Tell everyone you know about this.  Bombard social media with this, and then do it again once people have forgotten.  Raise our collective consciousness so we can live conscientiously.

4.  Tell your favorite chocolate companies that you won’t eat their slave chocolate.

Cadbury
Hershey’s
Godiva
Ghiradelli
Nestle
Russell Stover and Whitman’s

Contact them so they know about the boycott.  Tell them an improvement isn’t OK.  They need to pull out of the Ivory Coast or work with small farms they can and do control that operate with fair trade practices.

5.  Sign petitions to Congress to let them know they need to enact trade sanctions against these blatant human right violations.

In a world where snark reigns supreme, it is easy to avert our eyes or silence our sincere sadness.  It is easy to make jokes about being a chocoholic or about the unrealistic nature of ideals.  It is easy to do nothing.

And yet…

This is our one life we are living in the here and now.  We must never forget we are not fighting society, because we are society.  We are fortunate enough to be a collection of human beings who have the privilege and responsibility to shape our culture.  Corporations follow money.  Let us lead them with our ethics.

It is a small world we live in and there is no space left for child slaves.

None at all.