Chocolate, Chocolate Everywhere

“The US Department of State has estimated that more than 109,000 children in Cote D’Ivoire’s cocoa industry work under “the worst forms of child labor,” and that some 10,000 or more are victims of human trafficking or enslavement.” 2008 – International Labor Rights Forum


So back to me and my good intentions. When I met Emily back in October 2009, I was inspired to join the Fair Trade group at our church and get involved. Emily made this especially easy for me, by creating a group that was child-friendly. (A key phrase in my life). I was excited to be able to bring my kids to....yeah, wait...what were we going to do? Help the church bookstore sell Fair Trade chocolate. Wrap Fair Trade Christmas baskets for sale and Valentine's Day candy bars. Encourage the church to serve Fair Trade coffee. At first blush, it didn't seem like much. Until I started asking questions about my favorite item: the chocolate....

A brief bit about that yummy goodness that we call chocolate. Almost 40% of the world's chocolate, starts as cocoa beans growing in the Cote D'Ivoire, a (relatively) small area of Africa. Kind of amazing that something so popular, the world over, comes, in such large part, from one country. Godiva, Hershey, See's, Nestle, and the other major confectioners all, draw on these beans to make their product. And this is a problem because....of the quote that I used to start this post. There is child labor and slave labor running rampant in the area. But wait, I asked, as I could feel my heart kind of sinking, when I learned this....Do the companies know this? Well, yeah. Back in the early part of the decade (around 2001), the BBC and other news sources started reporting the enslavement of young children working in cocoa fields in the Cote D'Ivoire. Here in the United States, congress started pressuring the larger confectioners to ditch the slave labor cocoa. Legislation was introduced to ban the import of slave produced chocolate, but the companies stated that they would handle the problem by themselves. With the assistance of Senator Tom Harkin and representative Eliot Engel, the confectioners put forth a proposal (known as the Harkin-Engel protocol) announcing that they would eliminate child slave labor from their supply chains by July 2005. The follow-up report, written by Engel and Harkin themselves in 2008, is generally vague, but admits that there is "more work to be done" in the Cote D'Ivoire. However, according to our own State Department (see above quote!) as well as a number of Human Rights organizations, there is still plenty of child slave labor.

When I heard all of this information and started reading and checking sources, it might sound silly, but I felt a little betrayed by Hershey and the others. I mean, sure, they never promised me a rose garden, but seriously? That's what you're wrapping up in pretty sugar-coated shells and dumping into my M&M bag? Little kids being beaten and made to live in sheds so that they can slave over this stuff and watch some farmer sell it for less than nothing? My immediate knee-jerk reaction was - Well, I'm not paying for that.

But wait. Sure, it's one thing to cut out candy bars. No bigs. But what about chocolate chip cookies? And chocolate ice-cream? Now I can't have a mocha? Or toss together some brownies from a mix? Or make a chocolate cake from a mix, for that matter? And what do I hand out on Halloween? Or leave in an Easter basket for my kids to wake up to on Easter morning?

My head was spinning. It was kind of overwhelming. I decided to take a little while - a week or so, to let it all sink in before I started planning any personal changes for myself. I felt like the first step was to just sit with what I knew. Turn it over in my head. Be critical and be realistic. I knew that in order to go forward, I would need to do that.

What is Fair?

A lot of friends and family members ask me what "Fair Trade" means. In order for a product to be certified Fair Trade, it has to meet certain, very specific standards (much like USDA Organic). The major certification agencies - Fair Trade Federation and Transfair have their own standards that they are very transparent about.

Here is how I would personally explain it:

First, the item in question must be "traded". So it will, by definition, be something imported from another country. (In the United States of America, we have labor laws and public health laws that protect workers from being underage or exposed to dangerous chemicals, etc. Not all countries have this. So the products coming out of fields and factories elsewhere in the world can be, and often are, made by children, slave labor, or under dangerous conditions. Sometimes people ask me why we don't have Fair Trade farms here, and the answer is, in general, America is already pretty fair! We are protected by law in many cases, from doing what is being done in other places. Sure there are sweatshops and other bad rackets here too - but they are illegal. In other countries that do not have these laws and standards, this stuff isn't illegal - it's the norm! )

Secondly, the item in question was produced/grown etc under safe conditions by consenting adults who were paid a living wage (for their area) for their product. (So none of the above conditions were part of the the creation of this item.)

Additionally, Fair Trade co-ops must run transparent business practices, reinvest into their communities, and operate sustainably (this is why so often you see the organic label side by side with the Fair Trade label - you virtually have to have one to have the other.)

There are other elements, but these are the most important to me. When I began to learn about Fair Trade it was first described to me in terms of the people on the other end. How their lives were changed and bettered by working in a Fair Trade co-op. How they could send their kids to school instead of to work. How they were healthier and safer by not working with chemicals. But after a while, it started to dawn on me what the benefit of buying Fair Trade was on this end........
Because, yeah, after it came out that there was lead paint on a lot of American toys imported from China back in 2008, I have to admit, there was more than a few times that I walked into Target, looked around, wondered how many thousands of things in the store were from China or other countries, and then wondered how much we don't know about what we don't know. A lot, I am guessing. As dangerous as lead paint? Maybe not. Maybe.
I think it just kind of surprised me to realize that there was a label that could be put on imported products that basically said "This one was made the way you hope it was."

Good to know.

The Best of Intentions

Welcome to Fair and Square! I am Annie, and this is my blog about my personal journey through the world of Fair Trade.

"Fair Trade" means a lot of things to a lot of different people. While I have included links on this blog to larger, more comprehensive websites about Fair Trade, this blog is a lot smaller in content. It is just about me. Me and my family and the ways that Fair Trade has opened my eyes to the world around me and to my own habits.

A little history. About two years ago, I purchased several baskets of coffee, tea, cocoa and chocolate for my sisters at Christmas from the Fair Trade group at our church. At the time, I had no idea what Fair Trade was. All I knew was that I had a 9-month old baby, limited shopping time, and a memory that seemed to be functioning at low capacity. Without much convincing, I bought the baskets, exchanged pleasantries with the women selling them, and went on my way.

That might have been the end of my Fair Trade story, if I had not met my friend Emily. Emily was (and is) a member of the Fair Trade group that sold the baskets. When I properly met her, over a year later, at a church festival, I remembered the baskets, and I was able to ask her about them. We started talking about Fair Trade, and a part of me that had been asleep for a long time began to wake up.

Before having my children, I would have characterized myself as someone concerned about the planet and the people who live on it. After the birth of my daughter (my first baby), I kind of stopped caring about other people for a while and only worried about...well....my people. I think when I saw how many diapers a newborn can soil in a single day, and how much money it actually does cost to raise a family on a single income, my heart got a little hard. I didn't think that I had the time anymore to go help out at our local soup kitchen on Thursday nights (if the people there could tolerate colicky crying from a baby bjorn anyways). I didn't feel like I could wash out cloth diapers on five hours of sleep a night. And horror of horrors...sometimes after a day of errands, I found it easier to roll through McDonald's than to prepare something nutritious for my family. I felt like I was in survival mode at the time, and I just needed to get through however I could.

By the time I met Emily, though, I was looking for a change. I wanted to do something. I wanted to extend myself a little bit beyond the immediate needs of my small family. I titled this entry "the best of intentions" because I feel that good intentions get a bad rap in our society. Most of the time when you hear the phrase "the best of intentions", it is said with a sneer, and usually implies that whomever had these good intentions was an unhelpful dolt. But good intentions are the origins of truly good deeds, of social change, and sometimes of personal transformations. So I take them seriously. And I had them. I just didn't know what to do with them.

More on that in future entries!

For now, I will just say, that I decided to write this blog because my journey through Fair Trade is a journey that anyone could take. Being involved in Fair Trade, I have met many amazing people - TRULY amazing individuals, who have taken incredible journeys and done huge enormously good things. I hope to write about some of these people here. But I am not one of these folks. I am just one person doing what I can do. One of the choir, if you will. Choir members wanted!