I have avoided non-fairtrade chocolate ever since I first heard about this :
Cocoa is still farmed by slaves, not wage slaves like you and me but children, unpaid and abused.
That means unless you bought fair trade chocolate (can you even buy organic and fair trade goods in the united corporations of america ?) , the ingrediants in your lovely chocolate bar, coffee mocha or cookie was farmed or processed by a child slave.
Read about it at that awful pinko communist rag, Salon
Or google for action against slavery or panorama or child slavery
Re:Hate to burst your people
belg4mit on 2003-02-14T17:21:51
s/people/bubble/Re:Hate to burst your bubble
TeeJay on 2003-02-14T17:36:19
Actually the UK has country of origin labelling as does much of the EU. In fact the EU has very strong labelling laws that the US refuse to comply with about things like GMO, Origin, etc.Also you will find many shops where you can be sure that the products were sourced ethically such as Oxfam and others.
The worst products are clothing, rugs/carpets, sporting goods, charcoal and chocoloate. All are associated with child labor and slavery. A little research (or just buying british/local goods) means you can be pretty sure you don't have blood on your hands.
Re:Hate to burst your bubble
belg4mit on 2003-02-14T17:55:37
That is *required*? Hmm. Odd, as this came up in
a class just last semester (http://www.mit.edu/user/11.122/).
GMO is a horse of a different color.
It's hard to rate "worst" badness. But I'd likely
put shoes somewhere high up there. Or does that
fall under the British defiintion of clothing;-)
I'm pretty sure cacao doesn't grow in the UK,
nor carob for that matter:-P
Re:Hate to burst your bubble
TeeJay on 2003-02-16T22:59:28
Well when it comes to GMO - the US has been hampering Tracability of products and threatening a trade war over labelling GMO goods.In europe you can still survive without GMO food or products - no major supermarket will sell GMO food.
I think shoes come under both clothing and sporting goods.
You can buy fair traded products that ensure that farmers and workers are given a fair deal and decent working conditions so even if you don't buy UK produce you can be sure that it isn't contaminated by child slavery.
Re:Please Be Accurate
jdavidb on 2003-02-17T18:09:33
I felt the Salon story seemed to be blurring the truth a bit. At one point they are talking about slavery, at another they seem to be talking about families keeping their children out of school and making them work, perhaps comparable (perhaps much more severe, though) to the United States in the 1800s. It is unclear if all of the children they are talking about are slaves, or if some of them could be branded as underprivileged and perhaps they are trying to lump them all together to make the slave group look larger. I had the same impression I did when AT&T called and said they wouldn't charge me a $3 minimum fee anymore if I came back -- inquires into why their sentence was grammatically incorrect revealed that it did not, in fact, mean anything, and could be construed as a deliberate lie.
Regardless, this whole post and the accompanying story were interesting and revealing, and it made me aware of an issue I'll have to look for.
Re:Please Be Accurate
pudge on 2003-02-17T18:28:33
I have no problem at all with fairly presenting the issue. I have a problem with careless or intentional disregard for truth, in something that is so obviously wrong as saying that all chocolate, that is not from a particular source, is the result of child slavery.Re:Please Be Accurate
jdavidb on 2003-02-17T18:32:40
Right. I was mostly trying to amplify what you said and suggest that maybe the misrepresentation began at the Salon article.
Life has been so tough since I realized last year (thanks to some of you people, actually) that there seems to be no such thing as unbiased news!
Re:Please Be Accurate
TeeJay on 2003-02-17T22:01:48
Oh god!Its okay to eat chocoloate there is only a reasonable chance it was farmed by child slaves - it may have been produced or farmed by children forced to work by their families instead!
For pities sake you people spend so much time nitpicking you don't ever worry about actually worrying about the important issue.
Would you have shouted down those who opposed slavery because actually some slaves had been freed and others were domestic servents paid a pittance and therefore not slaves and entirely acceptable.
Chocolate has a big issue with unaccountability - the industry has failed to make any improvements or impose any tracability into their products.
Even allowing for a small proportion of chocolate being contaminated by child slavery and labour means that when put into mass production some of the chocolate you eat *will* have been through the hands of child slaves and you cannot prove otherwise.
I bet neither of you have given a second thought to having a hershies bar or a some chocolates because - what the hell its only a couple of slaves, maybe this chocolate bar won't send my sould to hell.
Re:Please Be Accurate
ziggy on 2003-02-18T20:12:45
No, we are worrying about the important issue: getting the facts straight. As pudge pointed out: «The Salon story says less than half of the chocolate imports come from a nation where some of the chocolate was farmed by children, some of whom are slaves.»For pities sake you people spend so much time nitpicking you don't ever worry about actually worrying about the important issue.I'm not a statistician, but for the sake of argument, let's say that the probability that a single chocolate bar is derived from slave labor is roughly 0.5 (less than half; I'm being generous) * 0.25 ("Some") * 0.25 ("Some"), or about a 3% chance that any random sample is "contaiminated by child slavery."
Perhaps the compounded probabilities that child labor and slavery were used to farm the chocolate is just too much for you to bear. If you choose to boycott chocolate or buy it at Oxfam (or from some other vendor participating in a fair trade program) that's your choice. However, don't expect us to be swayed to your POV by a sensationalist report, or by misrepresenting the facts of the issue.
If I were swayed by your POV, I wouldn't know where to stop. Obviously, I'd have to be a vegetarian at least (think about the cruelty in the slaughterhouses), or more likely a vegan (do I want cows subjugated to provide cream for my mushroom soup?). But it wouldn't end there. Should I be buying products from China, which uses slave labor in agriculture and manufacturing? Should I boycott US agricultural products because they use mistreated migrant labor to harvest possibly GMO crops? Should I boycott all South American products because I disagree with the kinds of repression they force upon their peoples?....
This is not a perfect world. It's sad that slavery works its way into the chocolate trade. The best thing we can do, paradoxically is buy chocolate and use commerce to pressure farmers from using child labor and slavery.
Re:Please Be Accurate
TeeJay on 2003-02-18T23:45:08
The facts are straight - The industry refuses to disclose the proportion of cocoa producedby chold labor or child slave labor.Each time you buy a chocolate bar - chances are the cocoa will not be from a single source - its not audited or accountable. Therefore if 50% of cocoa is from a country that suffers child slavery then there is a very high probability that some of that bar is from that country - say 80 to 90%.
Then because the cocoa from that country is again unaccountably bought in bulk and all mixed in, the odds of *some* of the cocoa in that bar produced by children would be a low proportion of 80% - say 50%, which would be 50% - so a 50/50 chance your chocolate bar contains cocoa from child labour, then again 50% chance that *some* of the cocoa from that bar is child slavery means that maybe a 25% chance that *some* of that cocoa in your chocolate bar is from child slavery - thats 1 in 4.
In your perfect nitpicking statistical world where you can't see the wood for the trees every child slave would have had all their cocoa kept perfectly together and never ever mixed with less contaminated cocoa so you could happily eat your chocolate knowing that only a tiny proportion of the chocolate bars you eat involved child slavery - this is foolish in the extreme. Lets face it there is a chance that a small ammount of the chocolate in any chocolate you eat required the suffering of child slaves.
Continuing to buy chocolate from big brands who remain unaccountable and turn a blind eye to slavery while keeping commodity prices so low as to ensure that some of their produce is from slavery means that slavery will continue or increase.
Buying chocolate (or coffee or clothing or sporting goods) that is fair trade ensures that a) big brands don't profit from slavery, b) you don't contribute to slavery and c) the cocoa farmers are given a fair price that allows them to form cooperatives and educate themselves.
