A billion dollars of chocolate is sold for Valentines Day, much of that by Hershey’s and Mars. They buy it through dealers like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargills, who buy it from equatorial cocoa growing countries. A big chunk of it comes from the Ivory Coast, where as many as 284,000 children are trafficked and enslaved to pick the crop.
43% of the world’s chocolate is produced by the Ivory Coast, the world’s largest producer.
Green guide to buy chocolate:
1. Chocolates grown with the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers simply don’t reek of romance. Choose candy certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Organic Program (the primary organic certifier in the United States), or a USDA-accredited certified (such as Quality Assurance International), to free your love from any toxic taint.
2. A fair-trade-certified label means that the cacao beans were purchased directly from the growers or a co-op of growers at a price higher than the commodity market rate. Certification also ensures that the price paid per pound of beans never fails below 10 cents more than the current market price, while imposing environmental-protection standards on growers, including a ban on the most hazardous pesticides and the use of sustainable growing practices. Child slavery, folks? Not hot.
3. he Rainforest Alliance (RA) focuses on how farms are managed, covering all aspects of production, such as environmental protection, worker rights, and the welfare and interests of the local community.
– Book “Bitter Chocolate” by Carol Off, treehugger, planetgreen
Regulators in Germany raided the offices of seven corporate chocolate makers — including Nestle, Kraft, and Mars — investigating allegations of price fixing. Six food conglomerates process half of the world’s cocoa, giving them tremendous leverage on price. Usually, they use their market power to squeeze farmers in the global south; evidently, they may now be using it to squeeze consumers in the global north. Canadian and even U.S. antitrust regulators have launched similar investigations, Bloomberg reports in the above-linked piece.
U.S. consumers spent $323 million on chocolate products during the week of Valentine’s Day alone, Nielsen estimates.
Very little U.S.-sold chocolate around 1 percent — carries Fair Trade certification. Another small fraction is “direct traded” — i.e., when an artisanal chocolate maker deals directly with cocoa-producing farms, paying a price well above the commodity cocoa price. Upwards of 97 percent of that $323 million went to the conventional chocolate market, where trade terms are anything but fair. And last week, Fortune Magazine ran an exposé of conditions in the Ivory Coast, source of 40 percent of the world’s cocoa. The farmers who grow the cocoa beans for Hershey’s Kisses, it turns out, work under conditions of persistent poverty, and are often forced by low prices to use school-age children in the fields. And the industry’s well-publicized efforts to address these problems turn out to be as frivolous as a supermarket bonbon. Christian Parenti, author of the Fortune report, appeared on the Democracy Now radio show on Valentine’s Day, along with a chocolate-industry flack. Parenti demolished the flack’s doubletalk about “successful education projects,” riposting that “if the industry cared about child labor and poverty, it would simply pay farmers more for cocoa beans.”
– by Tim Philpott