For Côte D'Ivoire, cocoa was part of a success story for many years. Under Fèlix Houphouët-Boigny, the country benefited from rising prices on sugar, lumber, and cocoa, but when the prices collapsed, so too did the country. Amid coups and turmoil, cocoa farmers were forced to cut costs, and slavery became a fiscally expedient option yet again. Attention from NGOs brought media attention. In a climate where food ethics were a hot issue, consumers like my friend were paying attention to the controversy.
In November 2001, along came Michael Finkel, with his New York Times Magazine story, "Is Youssouf Male a Slave?" In the profile he suggested that activists were so determined to find problems in the cocoa industry, they were making them up:
The boys were persuaded [by NGOs] that they were enslaved against their will, suggests Finkel's story, even though they were probably just poor kids looking for jobs and a chance to buy American goods such as Nike running shoes, as Youssouf Male apparently did.
It turned out, however, that it was Finkel who was making things up. Questioning by Save the Children Canada eventually led to the New York Times publication of a detailed correction.
Was it Finkel's piece that made chocolate a guilt-free indulgence again? His article came out at the same time as (what Off calls) "Big Chocolate" had set its PR machine into motion. The US Congress had also stepped in, with the Harkin-Engel Protocol, which aimed to eliminate the worst forms of child labour on cocoa farms by 2005. Most of all, though, war in Côte D'Ivoire made the logistics of chocolate production more complex — and more significant to the industry — than ethics.
The war, which makes it very difficult for journalists to follow up on the issue, also makes child-trafficking difficult, noted Off in a recent interview. Like dolphin-free tuna, the moral quandaries were no longer the focus of gastronomical navel-gazing.
Off details this complicated history and then she reminds us that public awareness and activism around cocoa are part of a larger consumer trend. This trend — green and ethical eating — has been co-opted by the very organizations towards which the largest criticisms have been leveled.
The consumer wouldn't know by looking at the labels that some of the most popular brands of organics in the alternative food stores are now owned by transnationals. Mars, Inc. has acquaired Seeds of Change, which first came on the US market in the late 1980s with the stated objective "to restore biodiversity and revolutionize the way we think about food." ... But Seeds of Change is hardly alone.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!
2 - Rodney North
(full disclosure: I'm a worker-owner & Board Director at Equal Exchange, a U.S. based worker cooperative that imports and sells organic, Fair Trade Certified chocolate and cocoa, www.equalexchange.coop)
As you might expect at Equal Exchange we have followed the cocoa/child labor scandal very closely. Consequently we think that 95% of "Bitter Chocolate" is a fantastic, badly needed work of morally-informed journalism. The 5% we think is lacking is what Bonnie was referring to, that the author fails to offer the reader any meaningfully way to respond to the gross injustices that she so thoroughly documents. This is a pity as those alternatives (organic & Fair Trade options) do exist. But I'll get to that in a second.
One reason that "Bitter Chocolate" is so important is that Off has gone to great lengths to uncover a story that no one else has really looked at since 2002. And even the work done back then pails in comparison to this book. For understandable, but regrettable, reasons the media (both alternative and mainstream) did not & still have not followed up on the child labor story (or other ugly parts of the cocoa trade)since 2002 and have either regurgitated the industry's assurances that something was being done, or have put out critical, but thin, articles that offered no new information, and certainly have not provided the grand expose that Ms. Off has put together.
All along I've suspected the worse of the industry, but she revealed that it is so much more tainted than even I could have imagined - and the persistence of exploited child labor is only part of the problem.
Re: the missing 5%
Ms. Off does provide a chapter near the end that touches on Fair Trade, but it's bizarrely lop-sided and gives the reader a distorted, incomplete and strangely negative picture of the efficacy and potential of this ethical alternative. Basically, she goes to Belize to look at the co-op that was the first to export to the Fair Trade market and finds a number of short-comings. Unfortunately she just leaves it at that and casts a pall over Fair Trade in general. What she did not do was to tell the readers that this first Fair Trade project has since spawned about a dozen more Fair Trade farmer-importer partnerships and that most of them are working much more effectively, and on a much bigger scale.
Nor does she tell readers of how the Fair Trade option is creating change within the marketplace and how it has already demonstrated in other commodities, especially coffee, that consumers can use the power of their pocketbook to nudge corporations to clean up their act (albeit slowly).
With that one caveat we strongly recommend the book.
~ Rodney North
3 - Renee Sweany
I work with Endangered Species Chocolate and couldn't agree more with Rodney from Equal Exchange. There are certainly options available that support a fair and ethical chocolate market.
To that end, Endangered Species Chocolate is firmly committed to purchasing only 100 percent ethically traded cacao. ESC’s all-natural cacao grows in Nigeria, and our organic cacao is sourced from the Conacado Co-op in the Dominican Republic. Farmers determine a fair price for their own crops. All ESC cacao is grown on family-owned properties, helping to sustain the habitats and communities in which they operate. The cacao is grown in the natural shade of rich, diverse forests. By purchasing ESC’s chocolate products, consumers help support sustainable forest farmland and the species that flourish there. Further, because ESC purchases ethically traded cacao, customers can rest assured farmers are working in humane conditions and being paid a fair price for their crop.
In February 2006, four ESC team members traveled to Nigeria’s Ikom regions, where our all-natural cacao is harvested. While observing ethical trade in action, ESC also sponsored the
provision of school supplies for local children and the installation of water pumps for the two local farming villages.
Through summer 2006, ESC’s organic products had been Fair Trade Certified through TransFair USA. The company now dedicates the dollars previously earmarked for TransFair certification to directly support the farmers in the Conacado Co-op, where ESC sources its organic cacao. This sourcing program ensures the cacao farmers in that co-op receive a fair wage.