Be Fair With Chocolate

Be Fair With Chocolate
Who doesn’t love chocolate? But eating it today comes with a test of conscience. Chocolate comes from cacao trees, grown in rainforests around the world. Cacao growers are paid poor prices for cacao beans and often children work family-owned cacao farms.

In 2001, Senator Tom Harkin and Congressman Elliot Engel created a protocol that urged the World Cocoa Foundation and the Candy Manufacturers Association to certify labor practices and abolish child labor and trafficking on cacao farms. These chocolate producers, which set the world’s prices for raw cacao and cocoa products, agreed to voluntarily stop child labor by July 15, 2005.

Chocolate producers began having growers' meetings, but little was done about child labor. They said that accessibility to farms for labor spot checks was limited and that they couldn’t follow the supply chain to the small farmer since all of the cacao beans are mixed together at a central location. They further insisted that the children were family members on these farms.

And although the World Cocoa Foundation and the Candy Manufacturers Association launched programs to improve local schools, encourage environmental stewardship, and support community health care, they didn’t offer workers a living wage. “They really want to figure out how to get rid of pests and teach people how to grow quality cocoa,” Kirsten Moller, the executive director of human-rights organization Global Exchange says, but adds, “They don’t have any interest in living wages."
Their mindset is that poor schools are the reason children are working on the family farm, she says. “If the parents are being paid a living wage,” Moller insists, “the kids won’t have to work.”

That is the major difference between what Fair Trade chocolate organizations offer and that of commercial importers. Fair Trade concentrates on the growers and workers, not on profits. There are fewer middlemen and less overhead costs, so the grower gets a bigger share of the price of chocolate. In many cases, nearly 40 percent of the retail price goes back to the grower.
The cacao farmer, although owning his own land and trees, works within a cooperative of local growers, using democratic principles to make sure working conditions are safe and that the workers’ culture and dignity are preserved.

Cooperatives also work together to reinvest their profits into improving the local community. These are not projects imposed on them from the outside, but generated within the community. And some fair trade organizations are working to move processing and manufacturing plants to the local communities to generate more jobs and to keep profits local. Fair trade organizations also help local growers maintain a sustainable crop by using sound agricultural techniques, including organic methods.

The Fair Trade Federation's Web site (www.fairtradefederation.com) has listings of vendors of Fair Trade chocolate products.