A Few Sentiments of the Season and Fair Trade Chocolate -Is Your Chocolate Slave-Free and Ethically Sourced?

A Few Sentiments of the Season and Fair Trade Chocolate -Is Your Chocolate Slave-Free?

These are a few of the Valentine's I made this year. I needed them to be quick, inexpensive, and be easy enough to involve the kids in. As you can see I am on a chalkboard paper and feathers kick lately.

The class Valentine's.

With all things hearty and lovey on the brain, I wanted to incorporate this into a baby shower gift for a friend who also loves to bake. The gift is under the tissue paper.

The view from our sun room post winter storm, Nemo. I have never beheld such a glorious winter wonderland.

The boys made their own Sparrow Post -a homage to the tradition in Tasha Tudor's book, A Time To Keep. I found that leading up to Valentine's Day, there were little Valentine's for stuffed animals, one another, friends, family, and even to our parakeet amassing here and there all over the house. Now they have somewhere to keep them all and open them on Valentine's Day.

I just could not get over the beauty of the snow.

I can't seem to figure out how to rotate this image correctly, but I had to include it regardless. Liam made me a snowy Valentine while waiting at the bus stop.

Winter Sunrise. What better way to start the day than with a heavenly image like this?

And then there were these brownies... (recipe to come when it isn't 2am).







Fair Trade Chocolate -Is Your Chocolate Slave-Free? 

The season of chocolate. This phrase is music to my ears. As an extreme cacao enthusiast I once used to eat any and every type of chocolate with abandon. I continued on in blissful ignorance until I saw a term on a chocolate bar at the store, "Slave-Free". What the??? This unusual term was all it took to spark my research on the subject. What I found was harrowing and unsettling. It turns our that 69% of the worlds cacao is sourced in unethical  working conditions and often by slave-children who are traded and trafficked for profit of the industry. An estimated 1.8 million children on the Ivory Coast are used in the production of cacao. Messed Up. Sure, children often have to work to supplement income in poverty stricken areas, but the conditions in which they work are revolting. Also, despite the common need for children to work, it is still completely garbage that societies have failed so immensely that children can not be schooled or develop talents/skills to better their lives or provide opportunity to escape their lot. 
As I said, the conditions in which these children work make me literally ill to think about. But we NEED to think about it AND DO something about it. Increased knowledge equals increased responsibility. Here is an example of just one issue these poor children face when working in the cacao fields.: 

"Cocoa trees are treated with pesticides and fungicides.^[14] Cocoa harvest is not restricted to one period per year and occurs over a period of several months to the whole year.^[15] Pods are harvested at multiple times during the harvest season because they do not all ripen at once.^[15] Pod ripening is judged by pod color, and ripe pods are harvested from the trunk and branches of the cocoa tree with a curved knife on a long pole.^[15] The pods are opened and wet beans are removed.^[14][15] Wet beans are transported to a facility so they can be fermented and dried.^[14][16]
Many of these tasks could be hazardous when performed by children, according to the ILO.^[9] Mixing and applying chemicals can be hazardous due to pesticide contamination,^[14][17] especially because no protective clothing is worn during application.^[16] Clearing vegetation and harvesting pods can be hazardous because these tasks are often done using machetes, which can cause lacerations.^[14] This skill is part of normal development in children 15 to 17 years old, but is a higher risk in younger children.^[16] Many have wounds on their legs where they have cut themselves.^[18] Transport of the wet beans can also be hazardous due to long transport distances and heavy loads; hernias and physical injuries can occur.^[16][17] The director of the Save the Children Fund described "young children carrying 6 kilograms (13 lb) of cocoa sacks so heavy that they have wounds all over their shoulders."^[19]
In 2002, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture investigated the prevalence of child labor in the cocoa industry.^[2] They found 284,000 children working in hazardous conditions in West Africa.^[2] Of this, 153,000 children applied pesticides without protective equipment, others picked pods and opened them to get the beans; 64% of the children were younger than 14 and 40% of the children were girls.^[2] Children often began working at 6 am, worked 12-hour days and were beaten regularly.^[2]"

^Also: 

Malian migrants have long worked on cocoa farms in Côte d'Ivoire,^[23] but in 2000 cocoa prices had dropped to a 10-year low and some farmers stopped paying their employees.^[23] The Malian counsel had to rescue some boys who had not been paid for five years and who were beaten if they tried to run away.^[23] Malian officials believed that 15,000 children, some as young as 11 years old, were working in Côte d'Ivoire in 2001.^[19] These children were often from poor families or the slums and were sold for "just a few dollars" to work in other countries.^[19] Parents were told the children would find work and send money home, but once the children left home, they often worked in conditions resembling slavery.^[2] In other cases, children begging for food were lured from bus stations and sold as slaves.^[24]

^{(sources-Wikipedia)}

^{Here is a video addressing this issue and giving advice on how to buy ethically sourced chocolate:} 

http://cnn.com/video/?/video/business/2012/01/20/cfp-quest-ethical-chocolate.cnn

  The next time you reach for that main-stream chocolate because it is cheap, familiar, and routine, perhaps you should recall images like this one to mind and be more aware that your actions DO affect people far removed from your comfy world.:

 ^{Image: http://myveganchristianlife.blogspot.com/2012/08/chocolate-slaves.html}

For a good list of chocolate companies that only derive their cocoa from ethical sources, go to this link: 

http://vision.ucsd.edu/~kbranson/stopchocolateslavery/main.html


This Valentine's Day, I sincerely hope that you do the right thing and purchase chocolate sourced ethically. After all, a holiday about love should reflect its intent through and through.