In article , lvhippy
wrote:


Statement on slavery and chocolate production


Because of the way the chocolate industry buys its cocoa it is not
possible to ensure that slave or other forms of illegal exploitation
have not been used in its production. To change this companies need
either to purchase direct from plantations where they can ensure the
growers implement core international labour standards, particularly
those banning forced labour and illegal child labour. If they continue
to purchase via the international cocoa exchange or other middlemen
they must work with cocoa producing countries, such as Côte d'Ivoire,
to ensure that the international labour standards are enforced
throughout the countries.

In the absence of industry action, the only way consumers can be
confident that the produce they use is free from exploited labour is
by buying products which carry a fair trade label.

Child labor is endemic to the cocoa, coffee, & cotton plantations
throughout the Ivory Coast, from whence over one-third of all chocolate in
America originates, as also in Ghana, which is cocoa-dependent in its
export trade. Many of the child slaves are purchased from families or from
slavers who get the children from Togo, Mali, & other poorer countries.
The Fair Trade label you hype has been awarded to 8 countries on the basis
of politics, not to specific farms, not with monitoring & enforcement.
Ivory Coast has refused to play the political game so is being more
heavily punished; nothing proves that nation's reality is worse than other
west & central african countries, but they are picked out for special
abuse, though in fact their cocoa growers are themselves small farmers
with rarely more than ten acres each. Slavery permeates the economy of
West Africa & no product is untainted.

A score of international activist organizations are working with unions &
the Ivory Coast government to "put an end to the worst forms of child
exploitation including slavery by 2005." Expect 2005 to be pushed back to
2010 then 2025. By one estimate 90% of the world's cocoa is produced with
child labor, & there is NO LABELING MECHANISM to identify the other 10%,
so your "fair trade" label method is to laugh. Fair trade is to palliate
consumer guilt & has no baring on the reality of production. Every grower
now claims to have banned child labor, but neither labor unions nor
governments have done anything to prove it one way or another; it's all
lipservice. You're not going to change the economic reality of this world
by reading the small print on the labels.

The growers are not big rich outfits exploiting the poor. They are mostly
small farms of about ten acres each, & whatever labor cannot be purchased
cheaply must be done by the family itself, children & all, with or without
profits. The only real way to improve conditions would be to delight in
paying maybe $20 for a small candybar instead of $2, & hope that the 2%
that filters back to these small exploited farm famlies adds up to ten
times as much money, so that they can themselves live better. Even that
would guarantee nothing really. But if in the wealthy United States we
can't provide living wages for farm workers, to believe pressuring Hershey
or M&M to sign a Fair Trade agreement is going to have any effect is naive
to the point of mental retardation. You are helpless. You can do nothing.
For every hundred-million pounds of "fair trade" chocolate so-labeled, it
is estimated that less than four million pounds of it is actually
purchased at fair trade prices, & anything less requires the continuance
of expoitative labor practices. Blaming the Ivory Coast, however, given
the conditions for farmworkers in America, is kind of a joke in itself.

The US House of Representatives in 2001 sustained a vote for a fair trade
label on products not apt to have required slaves, child or otherwise, in
their production. But that legislation didn't actual make it through both
houses into an enforcible law. The standards issued in 2002 in Geneva for
International Cocoa Initiative have no force of law; the voluntary system
is hit & miss for accuracy, & mostly miss. Fair trade labels are
meaningless, & are already being used as a new advertising gambit only.
Bolivia, Ecuador, & Nicaragua cocoa growers claiming not to use child
slaves in fact exploit indigenous people of all ages. Yet Bolivia has a
"debt bondage" system for non-paid labor that includes children, is legal,
is not defined by that government as slavery, so they can claim to adhere
to Fair Trade policies by their personal definitions.

Ghana has most laughably claimed to have eradicated child labor & won the
certification for that claim, though Ghana even maintains a LEGAL system
of child servitude called the Trokosi system by which children are bonded
to shrines either to work off a parent's debts, or a parent's sins. The
shrines in turn rent out the children to farms. The Trokosi system
shrine-slaves allow for growers to claim they don't personally use slaves,
since these are the slaves of corrupt religious institutions. The
Dominican Republic, one of the big offenders for child slave labor on
sugar plantations, signed on to the "no child labor on cocoa farms"
promise, & get to pretend Fair Trade. POSSIBLY there really are no child
slaves on the Costa Rica cocoa farms, as these farms aren't kept so poor
they have no other options. Too bad Belgian Chocolatiers & Swiss
Choclatiers get their ingredients (sugar & cocoa) from child-slave
nations; there haven't been documented cases of child slavery in Belgium
or Switzerland for decades.

Children are frequently snatched by slave raiders especially from the
Sahara, but in most African countries, a child can be purchased for one to
fourteen dollars (****able little girls are worth the most; the ones not
regarded as ****able will become house-slaves in POOR private households,
where they will be raped &/or beaten for even the least disobediences).
Slavers have a turn-around price for the same children of $200 for boys &
up to $340 for girls that can be sold as virgins (whether or not they
already have AIDs). Girl slaves are preferred not only because the sex
trade is more profitable than the field labor trade, but because boys upon
a certain age discover they might actually have cultural options & escape
or rebel. Girls don't. Also in most countries the number of children
purchased as house-slaves in perpetual servitude to poor households vastly
outnumbers child slave field workers. Eradicating all cocoa industry child
slaves would not put a dent in the majority of child slaves, who are girls
working as house slaves or in the sex trade.

Obtain NOTHING from Mali. Almost the entire population of Haretine black
Africans are slaves to the Beydanes white Arab-Berbers. It is the Berbers
who sell the Haretine children to small cocoa farms & large sugar
plantations throughout the continent.

Although the cocoa growers are themselves tiny companies that do not have
resources to house the endless numbers of slaves, they have nevertheless
been singled out as representative or worst offenders when they are not.
The new sales angles posing as Fair Trade punish small farmers in the
Ivory Coast & rewards farmers no better or no worse in Bolivia or Ghana.
It's all pure hypocrisy. To further punish poor areas of Africa will
heighten the slave trade, not relieve it. Unions could do more than
governments to effect farm practices, if both governments & big
international companies weren't such inveterate union-busters.

If this issue particularly burdens you, stop eating chocolate. But you
will also have to stop wearing shoes. Stop vacationing in the top ten
nations for child prostitution including the United States from whence
comes the vast majority of the customers in the other nine worst offending
countries. Stop drinking coffee, stop eating in American fast-food
restaurants which have exemptions from paying minors so much as a basic
minimum wage, stop eating fresh produce picked by exploited itinerant &
undocumented families inclusive of children, stop purchasing dried flowers
in upscale hobby shops as these are nearly always picked & dried by
imigrant Southeast Asian families including their children for as a little
as ten dollars for a long day's labor & the kids don't even get to keep
the $10 which goes to the family budget. Stop eating sugar. Support
NOTHING from Haiti where it is estimated fully 5% of the child population
has been sold into servitude as house slaves (the children of the poorest
of the poor sold to families that are slightly less poor, & never treated
well thereafter. It's called the Restavek system, & it has become a
standard cultural practice). Do not support anything Canadian, as Canada
has a major child slave network, about a dozen Asian girls & boys per
month are brought to British Columbia on "visitors permits" & never again
seen -- dispersed throughout North America & forced to work in the sex
trade to "earn back" the costs of the getting them here (a "debt" on
average of $40,000 per child, which they will never ever be able to pay
back), plus a few Canadian runaways smuggled OUT of the country by the
same people, to serve as sex slaves in other countries.

Oh, & buy no silk from India, where the most delicate work is done by
little girls categorized as "bonded servants" but these are slaves pure &
simple. The majority of the Dalit population is by a millenia-old
tradition provided little access to the nation's economy other than as
slaves, & estimates range from a quarter million to over a million Dalit
children caught up by this hereditary fate. In India child slaves are the
preferred workers in such dangerous or toxic "unpaid occupations" as
matchstick dipping & fireworks manufacturer. The gem & jewelry industries
is also dominated by child 'bonded servants,' less than 20% of whom are
paid anything, because they are working off their parents' debts at
interest rates that can never balance out to zero.

Stop eating imported fish. Most nations with a fishing fleet involve
unpaid boys, many of them openly purchased from child traffikers. These
fisherlads are frequently killed due to the dangers of the job. Also, do
not support the United States government, which has an unofficial policy
of tolerating the slaves brought into New York & Washington D.C., & other
major cities, by diplomats; Bahrain & other gulf state diplomats have
included minor children among their personal slaves brought to America. A
vast number of child slave-prostitutes are smuggled into the USA every
year; the US does attempt to stop this, but where diplomats are concerned,
tolerance of slavery is the rule, especially when like the Bahrainis the
slave-holders are oil-friendly diplomats with direct ties to the Bush
family business dealings (the Shrub had MANY oil dealings with owners of
child slaves before he was president, & still seems to define mid east
policies through his old business associates, including war policies).

Diplomats excluded, bare in mind the highest number of slaves are held by
poor people, not by rich people. Rich people CAN underpay for cheap labor
while busting unions that attempt to serve peasant or worker interests.
The only real way to get rid of slavery is to get rid of poverty, but that
would mean a redistribution of wealth that'd undermine the wealthy, so
good luck fighting the rich. It is just so damned easy to punish the poor
for being bad people, while the rich just keep getting richer & flash
their lily-white fingers are utterly clean. Rich countries & companies
exploit poor countries & small farm families, & these poor countries in
turn exploit entirely destitute countries & villagers.

So fight poverty, not chocolate.

And support unions, not industry-defined trade policies.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/