Fair Trade Chocolate: Is Worth Buying?

During this Halloween season, we can see shelves stocked with different types of candy, especially chocolate. Chocolate is one of the most consumed products in the world. 3 million tons of it are consumed every year. Unfortunately many of the big name brands, such as Nestle and Mars, are buying cocoa beans from cocoa plantations that use child labor mainly in the countries of the Ivory Coast and Ghana in Africa. According to the 10 Campaign, an estimated 1.8 million children are working in these cocoa plantations. As part of their job, they are required to carry heavy loads and work with dangerous tools such as machetes. The documentary the Dark Side of Chocolate directed by Miki Mistrati provides actual footage of children being trafficked and working in these plantations. In Kevin Bales' Ending Slavery, there is a section about the poor conditions of these slaves and stories of children that successfully escaped. Pictures of young boys with scars on their backs from the beatings of their plantation owners show that these children are being treated as slaves. Chocolate companies take no responsibility for the working conditions in these plantations. When Mistrati wrote to these companies about the use of child slaves to harvest their cocoa they responded with the statement "The vast majority of cocoa farms are not owned by the companies that make chocolate or supply cocoa and claim that they don't have control over the cocoa farms and labor practices."

A solution to this problem? Many anti-Child Labor/Human Trafficking advocacy groups suggest buying fair trade. But is this really buying? Is it going to help the problem of trafficking African children to the Ivory Coast and Uganda to work for little to no pay in cocoa plantations? Though this may seem like a reasonable solution, it is not a major help to that cause. It rather helps out those who are working in plantations that are being treated fairly and paid well. That's why it is called fair trade, because the chocolate company is buying cocoa from cocoa plantations that have proven to the company that they pay their workers and treat them well, or that the company owns their own plantations and regulates them well with good pay and fair labor.

So what can we do to make sure that fair trade cocoa is being bought by the big chocolate companies? Kevin Bales, in response to Fair Trade Chocolate in a CNN interview said buying fair trade is good, better than buying from big name brands. We, instead, need to pressure the chocolate industry to buy cocoa from plantations with fair labor. "While it is important to continue to pressure the chocolate industry to keep their supply chains free of slavery, there are other cocoa-using industries like cosmetics and food manufacturers, that have not taken part in dealing with the problem in their source material." So chocolate isn't the only issue at hand, but it is still a pretty big one and the slavery is still occurring today. 

So the next time you pick up a candy bar, do your research and see if that company is buying fair trade cocoa. If they don't know, it isn't fair trade. Urge them and your friends to notify these companies that they will not buy their products anymore until they have proven that their cocoa is made with fair labor and in the meantime--buy fair trade.