A Fair Halloween

My friend Bob forwarded to me the following e-mail. This is a wonderful idea and makes me glad that I skipped the cheap, monstrous-sized bag of chocolate at Target this afternoon. The following suggestion seems so much better:

Halloween will soon be upon us. Chocolate is a favorite Halloween treat. But you may not know that MOST chocolate that arrives here in the U.S. comes from child cocoa laborers that work on family farms, even as slaves. The U.S. chocolate industry says it's working to end abusive child labor on cocoa farms, but so far little has been accomplished and their plan does NOT guarantee farmers a fair and stable price for their cocoa. There is a solution -- Fair Trade Certified Chocolate! Fair Trade guarantees farmers a fair price for their cocoa, so they can feed their families and keep their kids in school. Fair Trade does not allow abusive child labor or forced labor.

I want to share with you an opportunity to participate in making certain that farmers get fair compensation for their goods. Would you consider giving out fair trade chocolate with an accompanying note this Halloween? Click here to learn more. At this global exchange web site, you can even download Halloween cards explaining fair trade chocolate!

No one loves chocolate more than me!!! But as I consider more and more the abusive conditions under which the cocoa is harvested to give me a pleasurable treat, I want to make a difference in the process.

This Halloween campaign is a small, but significant, effort toward a day when all is REALLY fair in the world. Take a look at the website. And I hope you will choose to make a difference.

That website again is: http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade/cocoa/halloween.html
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If nothing else, I will be making a trip to Trader Joe's before the kiddies ring my door bell.

UPDATE (9/27/07): I think the links had issues, but they should be correct now.

Slave Chocolate

When it comes to treats, nothing makes me smile like a block of seriously dark chocolate. So it broke my heart to hear that most of the chocolate for sale is produced by slaves, and mostly children at that.

Boycott chocolate? Will that solve the problem? Maybe not according to some articles I've read. (Click on this post's title to read one of the articles.) Still how can I eat chocolate when I know this? Just before I learned about "slave chocolate" a friend gave me a large bag of a favorite kind of chocolate. Each time I ate a piece, a mental image popped up of a child working in a field when he or she should be in school or out playing. Time to quit chocolate?

Enter free trade chocolate.

I thought it would be difficult to find, but the new Trader Joe's in town carries an affordable house brand of free trade chocolate, produced under standards similar to those that ensure coffee is grown and sold in a socially responsible manner. This means good growing practices, living wages for crops and fair worker policies.

Phew! I still get to hoard dark chocolate in my desk drawer, and it might even taste better ...