Bittersweet Chocolate

Caught between Christmas and Easter, Valentines Day came upon us, another holiday promoting the use of chocolate as an alternative to sex.

Well, that’s not the real reason, but during all of those holidays, it will be in high demand and shelves will be stocked with chocolate from around the world, that confectioners have fashioned into small sweets that can easily fit between our fingers.

But whose hands actually made this luxury possible? Our own desire for this seemingly innocent substance helps to fuel a practice that so many from this country have died fighting against, a practice so abhorrent that we have long abolished it within these borders.

But our hands are the ones cracking the whips that drive the slave trade and human trafficking, every single time that we reach for another product produced using unfair trade and employment practices.

Fair trade-certified brands are those that recognize the problem of exploitation in their industries and have made a commitment to practices that promote proper treatment of workers. This means things like offering a fair price to farmers and not using ingredients that were produced using slave labor.

To the consumer, it may mean paying a little bit more for peace of mind, but using products that do not contribute to global problems seems worth the cost.

One organization that has been fighting against human trafficking is Stop the Traffik (stopthetraffik.org), which has just recently come up with one million signatures that will be presented at the first United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Trafficking (UN GIFT) conference.

These signatures are in support of making stronger efforts to prevent the sale of people, protect the victims and prosecute the traffickers, and will be presented on February 13, 2008 at the United Nations.

What has this got to do with chocolate? Nearly half of the world’s chocolate is made from cocoa grown in the Ivory Coast, in Africa. Twelve thousand children have been trafficked into cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast.

This means consumers of chocolate here in the United States, Canada, and other developed countries may be contributing to the captivity of children for the purposes of slave labour in other parts of the world.

Stop the Traffik wants “all chocolate companies to be able to stamp onto their chocolate wrappers a guarantee that the cocoa beans have not been harvested by trafficked labor.” By supporting this organization and working toward putting an end to injustice on the other side of the world, each consumer has the ability to ensure that none of their purchases cost another human being his or her freedom.