AThere's a Fair Trade alternative to the cholocolate-industry status quo
By ‘Treehugger’ Dan Swartz
Much of the following article is based on the book Bitter Chocolate by Carol Off.
Until the 1970s, many cocoa crops were planted beneath the rainforest canopy. This kind of permaculture allowed cocoa farmers to produce their crop while leaving the rainforest canopy intact to support migratory songbirds, medicinal plants, and diverse wildlife dependent on what lives above, below, and in the canopy. However, phenomenal demand has led farmers to try to increase cocoa bean yields by switching to ‘full-sun production’ – in other words, clear-cutting the rain forest in order to plant cocoa trees.
Cocoa crops that have been grown in full-sun require high quantities of fertilizers and pesticides to combat stress from heat and increased susceptibility to insects and disease. The absence of leaf litter means that the system depletes the soil more intensively. Cacao trees grown this way are second only to cotton in crops that require the most pesticides, of which Lindane is the most common. “Lindane is a toxic insecticide and has frequently been compared to DDT. Currently, Lindane is banned in approximately 52 countries. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decided on August 2, 2006 not to renew the registration of Lindane as an insecticide. Jim Jones, director of the EPA's pesticide programme, stated the agency weighed Lindane's toxicity and persistence in the environment against its "very few benefits for users", considering the fact that safer alternatives available. The EPA has recognised the hazards of Lindane for years, calling it quite toxic to humans, and has classified it as a probable carcinogen; and, in high doses, it damages the human nervous system, liver, and immune systems.
On the other hand, the inputs required for organic cocoa cultivation are minimal compared to non-organic methods. A multi-layered forest system is the optimum environment, since cocoa can be used as an ‘anchor’ cash crop in a diversified agro-forestry system. In fact, it allows for multiple cash and subsistence crops to be cultivated simultaneously, such as fruit, medicinal plants, spices, building material, animals and root crops.
Fair Trade started in the The Netherlands in 1988 with the Max Havelaar brand. Fair Trade is a system in which: trading partnerships are based on reciprocal benefits and mutual respect; a fair price is guaranteed to small farmers and producers for their products; prices paid to producers reflects the work they do; workers have the right to organise; national health, safety, and wage laws are enforced; products are environmentally sustainable and conserve natural resources.
With the profits generated from receiving fair wages, coffee growers can invest in health, education and environmental protection. Fair Trade for small farmers means community development, health, education and environmental stewardship. Fair Trade ensures also that no child, prison or slave labour is involved in the production. For example, many of the carpets and footballs in the world are made by child labour in places such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. Worldwide, there are over 240 million children working in the fields and factories instead of going to school. But we’ll get to that.
A Trip to the Candy Store
One of my favourite movies as a kid was Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971). What child did not want to win the golden ticket? Who didn’t want to see the mysteries hidden behind the tall walls of the factory? Who didn’t feverishly ride their bikes to the penny candy store at every chance and buy sweets with grubby hands and hungry eyes? Isn’t this why we worked for our allowance money? It was not until 15 years later in college that upon watching the film again after many years that I realised the film was actually about imperialism and colonialism. While I was taking out the trash and mowing the lawn for five dollars a week, other children in the Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Mexico, Ghana and elsewhere were literally slaves and worked to death by the thousands for those same chocolates. In fact, most of these children are ignorant of what they’re harvesting or what it’s used for – and their employers keep them that way.
A short history of chocolate
Cocoa was first used by the Olmec in Mesoamerica as a drink. It was so highly prized that the Mayans and Aztecs later used cocoa beans as currency, not gold or silver. Cocoa pods are the size of butternut squash, containing grey-purple seeds the size of almonds in tan-coloured pulp. The pods are split and the seeds left to ferment and dry before being roasted. The Spanish first developed a triangular trade bringing weapons and salted cod to Africa, African slaves to the Americas (12-15 million) to work the cocoa plantations, and chocolate to Europe. Following Cortez’s conquest, Spanish priests and monks began adding sugar and, later, spices to the brew. Chocolate’s pharmaceutical properties are thought to include theobromine and caffeine, which stimulate and dilate blood vessels; phenylethylamine, which stimulates sexual drive; serotonin, a mind-altering chemical that can relieve depression; and, perhaps, antioxidants. Europeans still bought cocoa in pharmacies up until the 1800s.
Until 1828, the cocoa butter content, so highly valued and warred over by the Aztecs and Mayans, was routinely thrown out by Europeans who found it unpalatable. They tried everything to reduce the cocoa butter content, but it was still 50 percent fat. Dutchman C.J. van Houten invented a hydraulic cocoa press to squeeze the grease from the roasted beans. He later determined the right fat content, making it easy to emulsify for home preparation. In 1840, Quaker Joseph Fry attached a steam engine to Van Houten’s press. He also began to mix back some of the cocoa butter into the cocoa powder, and the resulting mass could then be moulded into the modern “melt in your mouth” chocolate bar. Quakers were integral in the chocolate trade because, unlike other commodity production enterprises, they did not find it sinful. Another Quaker, Cadbury created the first box of bonbons in the 1860s, intimately linked chocolate to Valentine’s Day, and in 1875 introduced the first chocolate Easter egg.
The emerging ‘dark side’
English investigative reporter Henry Woodd Nevinson began investigating the cocoa trade at about this time. The Portuguese-controlled islands of Sao Tome and Principe (Cameroon) were both the leading producers of cocoa, as well as the location of some of the worst industry-related abuses. The Portuguese brought slave labour from Angola, none of whom ever returned home. The British Government turned a blind eye to the Portuguese practices because they did not want dirt dredged up about their own use of slave labour in the gold and diamond mines of South Africa. Twenty years after the first reports, neither the British Government nor the supposedly socially-concerned Quaker chocolate magnates had lifted a finger to stop the slavery.
Cocoa was not the only commodity based on slave labour, nor were the worst abuses in this sector, but Cadbury, Rowntree, Fry and others had had managed to raise chocolate to an exalted status, a symbol of joy, an innocent pleasure; but in reality it was made through the immiseration of its slave labourers. Because of the wholesome symbolism surrounding chocolate, people expected higher corporate and moral standards from chocolate companies than, say, from the diamond and gold profiteers.
In 1887, Henri Nestle, a Swiss, blended milk with cocoa solids to create milk chocolate. Milton S. Hersey later used condensed and powdered milk to the same effect in the US. Meanwhile, UK companies moved their operations to Trinidad and Jamaica, partly because their plantations in Africa were being decimated by disease, but also to avoid scrutiny. Corporations imported slave labour from China and elsewhere to work the new plantations. In 1910, the US passed a law prohibiting the import of cocoa produced with slave labour. However, US companies controlled sugar production in Cuba, a major component in chocolate, using slaves from China and Africa.
In the 1930s, Forrest Mars introduced the Milky Way (Mars Bar in the UK), Snickers and Three Musketeers candy bars, using solidified malted milk drink and nougat coated in chocolate. Rowntree introduced the Kit Kat, Black Magic and Aero bars about the same time.
Child slavery becomes chocolate’s secret ingredient
While cocoa plantations in the Americas were in turn destroyed by disease, and companies relocated to Africa again, Mars and Hershey’s joined forces to produce Smarties and M&Ms. The Gold Coast (Ghana) then became the world’s leading cocoa producer, but was then surpassed by Côte d’Ivoire in the 1980s, the latter country’s ‘benevolent dictator’ Felix Houphouet-Boigny having converted the national economy and staked its future in the 1960s on cocoa. But by the 1990s, Ivory Coast had descended into poverty, chaos and war. Meanwhile, child trafficking from Mali and Burkina Faso assisted Ivory Coast in maintaining a supply of more than half of the world’s cocoa. “Child slavery had become the secret ingredient in chocolate,” writes Carolyn Off, author of Bitter Chocolate. UNICEF and the US State Department estimated that more than 15,000 child slaves worked Ivory Coast in 1998. Mali’s government did very little to stem the practice, since the country depended on trade with its neighbour.
Attempts to curb chocolate industry abuses
US Congressman Eliot Engel introduced a law in 2001 that would have created a “slave free” label for chocolate like the “dolphin safe” label for tuna fish. Senator Tom Harkin joined in the fight, but the senator had already learned that there was a fine line between human rights and economic necessity. Harkin had introduced the Child Labor Defense Act in 1992 to boycott goods manufactured with child labour. Bangladeshi garment manufacturers subsequently panicked, and 50,000 children were fired, who then took on even more dangerous jobs like rock crushing to help support their families. The balance is to “find a way to take the hazards out of the work, not the child out of work,” says Off.
‘Big Chocolate’ hired former US senators Bob Dole and George Mitchell to lobby against the bill, and the resulting wrangle produced an agreement called the Harkin-Engel Protocol that delineated six points to eliminate child labour in the cocoa chain by July 2005. The agreement, however, was voluntary and did not include provisions for fair wages or fair bean prices.
In 2002, Big Chocolate adopted the protocol worldwide, becoming the International Cocoa Initiative. Simultaneously, an industry-funded investigation found that while there was no slavery, 284,000 children worked in hazardous conditions on cocoa farms in West Africa, two-thirds of these in Côte d’Ivoire. The International Labor Rights Fund rejected the protocol and filed suit using a 1930 US law prohibiting the import of goods made by slaves.
Big Chocolate failed to make the 2005 deadline, and by a wide margin. They are now setting up a small pilot project in Ghana, now the biggest producer of cocoa along with Indonesia; and the International Labor Rights Fund has filed a class action suit against Nestle, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland for trafficking, torture and forced labour on behalf of former child slaves.
Beginnings of a solution
Smaller chocolate producers took the lead in “slave free” or socially-conscious chocolate, later integrated into the Fair Trade system. Green & Blacks became the first Fair Trade chocolate in 1994, its signature product being the Maya Gold chocolate bar. High school enrolment for farming families supplying Green & Black has grown from 10 percent to 70 percent. If farmers are paid, they normally get around 25 cents per pound, whereas in the Fair Trade system they are guaranteed a minimum of 89 cents per pound plus premiums.
Easter marks one of the biggest shopping holiday seasons of the year when it comes to chocolate. By purchasing organic and Fair Trade chocolate, your money will no longer be going towards toxic pesticides, child slavery, and farm worker exploitation. For Easter, buy something made with hope and love, and help small farmers in poorer parts of the world to breat out of the cycle of poverty.
