They are eating my fleshI'm just taking what I posted earlier in a forum and sticking it here... "I became interested in this when David told me that one of his college professors claimed that Nestle chocolate was made by slaves in Africa. Of course my initial reaction was "lol wut." I mean we all now that higher education has a liberal bias and that this is probably an ill-informed and outlandish accusation made by some aging hippy. There's no way that modern countries are still profiting from slave labor....right? http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12754The truth behind the chocolate is anything but sweet. On the Ivory Coast of Africa, the origin of nearly half of the world's cocoa, hundreds of thousands of children work or are enslaved on cocoa farms. With poverty running rampant and average cocoa revenues ranging from $30-$108 per household member per year, producers have no choice but to utilize child labor for dangerous farming tasks. Some children, seeking to help their poor families, even end up as slaves on cocoa farms far from home. Slavery drags on and we are paying the slaveholder's wages.
This may be old news but I certainly didn't know about it until recently. Soooo if I make a vow to never again buy nonfair-trade labeled chocolate again is that actually an effective way to fight slavery or is it wishful thinking? I've always had a lot of resentment against corporations but thought that the best way to stop things like Wal-mart encouraging their workers to apply for welfare instead of providing benefits themselves or meat packing plant workers in Texas not getting compensated when a limb gets chopped off was by voting with your dollar. This is where fair trade comes in. http://www.transfairusa.org/The thing is their search engine doesn't bring up anything in the Dallas area. They claim on another site to supply fair trade products to places like Krogers, Walmart, and Target which means I don't have to bump elbows with hippies at the local organic foods and beads shop but I don't recall ever seeing their logo on anything. Of course I haven't been looking for it but I generally give something a once over before I buy it and I should be able to recall seeing something labeled as a fair-trade product at least once. They do have a list of large scale companies but not individual products. I can't remember who makes what when I stop by the grocery store. So does anyone look for FTF products? Are they hard to pick out? Will I ever be able to enjoy chocolate again? Only thing is there's not much of an explanation for the scores and I'm not exactly thrilled by the prospect of changing my shopping habits because some company got an F score for unknown reasons. This whole endeavour is motivated by wanting to be enlightened about things. | 
