An education in progress

Ok we are back and hitting the ground running.  Sorry for my long absence.  A Little unplanned hiatus there.  Long uninteresting story as to why but hopefully we will be back at it regularly from now on.  At least weekly although my goal is to post on Mondays and then throw in an extra blog or two throughout the week on various topics so please stay tuned and bring a friend (or ten) . . .

If you are interested in the issue of Fair Trade or Consumer Justice or want to learn more about that treat we all know and love – CHOCOLATE! - and haven’t seen the previous posts – please go back and review them I think they provide a good background for the issues we are trying to tackle here.  We have been talking about the underlying injustice of the cocoa industry and what we can do to change things.  My goal is to provide information about the state of things so we can become knowledgeable as well as specific ideas about steps we can take to actually impact the situation to make a difference.  So far we have identified three actions steps that anyone who chooses to can take to make a difference:

1.      Stop buying chocolate that was grown or harvested by slaves – this essentially means any non fair trade chocolate (except Ghiardelli which uses cocoa from South and Central America where slavery is not known to be a problem);

2.       Buy fair-trade chocolate; and

3.       Contact the stores where you normally buy chocolate and urge them to carry fair trade.

Now what we have been addressing thus far is not supporting a great evil (chocolate touched by slavery) and choosing instead to support companies that ensure their products are also not touched by slavery.  The second and third action step moves us into the positive change arena.  By buying fair-trade and urging our stores to carry more fair-trade we are attempting further support for an industry that makes real and important efforts to create products that compensate laborers fairly and do not harm the environment.

But the other side of the coin is the cocoa industry itself and the chocolate companies that profit from the atrocities of slavery and forced labor.  It’s all well and good to support those outside the mainstream cocoa industry and hope they will become more popular and commonplace.  But in the mean time children are trafficked, beaten and oppressed in the service of the major chocolate companies. 

So we turn our attention now to the political arena.

First a little history lesson because well I love history and our government did actually try and address this issue back in 2001 with something I referred to in one of my earlier posts called the Harkin-Engel protocol.

It was an amendment to an agriculture bill.  It would have given the FDA $250,000 to develop a label to put on chocolate products to indicate no child slave labor was used in growing or harvesting the cocoa used– similar to the dolphin safe tuna label.  Honestly not sure why the development of a label cost a quarter of a million dollars but there it is.  The bill passed the House 291-115.

Then the Cocoa lobby got involved.  Didn’t know there was a cocoa lobby?  I think there is perhaps a lobby for everyone and everything hidden somewhere in the recesses of Washington DC just waiting to be needed.  Like they hit a button and a secret cave emerges and the necessary forces emerge. The Cocoa lobby hired some big guns though, former Senators George Mitchell and Bob Dole.  They lobbied hard against the Protocol and before the Senate even voted on it the Cocoa industry agreed to address the problem itself without any formal legislation – why was no one even slightly skeptical?

So then Senator Tom Harkin from Iowa and Representative Eliot Engel from New York negotiated a deal with representatives from the cocoa industry that they called the Harkin-Engel Protocol.  Somewhat narcissistic but I’m sure they would have named it something else if they had realized how forgettable and/or useless it would end up being.  It was signed in September of 2001.  Its stated objective was to eliminate the worst forms of child labor and adult forced labor on cocoa farms in West Africa.  It was signed and witnessed by the heads of the eight major chocolate companies, Senator Harkin, Representative Engel, the Ambassador from Cote d’Ivoire, the Director of the International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor and others.  So frankly I’m thinking where have all of these people been for the last twelve years as this thing has been completely ignored . . . but more on that in the future. 

The protocol laid out  - key word coming – NON BINDING – agreements for the cocoa industry to regulate itself without any legal implications if they did not but Engel threatened to reintroduce the deadlines form the original bill if they did not – kind of an empty threat I guess because well twelve years later and  not much has changed slavery is still rampant in the cocoa fields of west Africa. . . So this seems to be how lobbyist earn their big fat paychecks.  They get Congressman to drop bills that will affect real change and sign on to “protocol” that sound good and leave child slaves hacking away with machetes in the fields of West Africa.

 

So what can we do besides rant and rave as I have done above just a little? 

We will talk about that next time.  Hopefully I have gotten you angry enough to want to do something more than our reps did and we’ll walk through the what and the how next time.  Did I say stay tuned yet?  Well please do!