Make sure your romantic gestures this Valentine’s Day season are truly made with love
Valentine’s Day is coming up this Saturday!! (for those of you that may need reminding) During this time of year flower shops are hopping, restaurants are booked, and pink and red decorate every building. However, most importantly, stores are stocked with chocolate—chocolate variety boxes, heart-shaped boxes of chocolate, pink stuffed bears holding candy bars, chocolate-covered strawberries- you name it! Whether dark, milk, or white chocolate, people go crazy to get their loved ones special sweet treats to express their affection.
According to recent numbers recorded by CNN, consumers spend about $1.6 billion on candy each Valentine’s Day. Most specifically, Americans are expected to spend about $800 million on just chocolates this Valentine’s Day. With the most expensive box of chocolates ever sold being a $1.5 million “Le Chocolate Box” including a dozen gourmet chocolates as well as diamond and emerald necklaces, earrings, rings, etc. or Serendipity 3’s $25,000 Frrrozen Haute Chocolate (blend of 28 cocoas infused with 5 grams of edible 23-karat gold and served in a goblet lined with edible gold), people seem to go crazy when it comes to chocolate.
What most people do not even consider when they buy the cute little heart-shaped boxes of chocolate for their significant other is the impact that this gesture is having on lives world-wide.
Does that box really represent love if a child underwent slave labor to make that chocolate possible? Is that really the message you want to give to your loved one? For most of us, we don’t even think about that. We don’t want to think about it. We see a piece of Hershey’s chocolate in front of us and devour the sweet delectable treat, not even paying a second of mind to the labor that may have gone into it. My eyes were opened to the reality of the situation as I just recently watched a short film, The Dark Side of Chocolate, where a crew went into West Africa to get an inside look on where companies like Hershey’s and Nestle get their cocoa beans from.
What I saw was absolutely horrifying.
Cocoa farms use child labor—kids as young as 6 or 7—in order to keep their prices at the rates that the big time chocolate companies are demanding. Kids receiving absolutely no pay for their years and years of hard, manual labor.
The chocolate industry functions due to the supply of cocoa from West African countries with the Ivory Coast supplying just about 50%. According to a recent article for CNN’s Freedom Project Initiative, more than 70% of the entire world’s cocoa market is supplied by West African countries. At first glance this might seem ok, as it is this part of the world that seems to be able to grow copious amounts of these beans. Tropical climates prevalent in areas such as Western Africa are perfect to harvest the cacao bean, which is what then produces the chocolate familiar to us. Looking deeper, the horrors become even clearer.
In the film, The Dark Side of Chocolate, of the young boys Amadou (one of the 200,000 estimated young children enslaved on the Ivory Coast for chocolate production) told the interviewer, “When People Eat Chocolate, They Are Eating My Flesh”.
They are Eating My Flesh.
My heart sank. My stomach turned. How could I be so blind to the fact that slavery, child slavery, is very much so a part of the world around me?
Another boy Drissa then went on to take off the ripped and ragged shirt hanging on his body to reveal the deep scars cutting through his entire back. Similar scars cut through the flesh of all of the boys ranging from age 10-16 or so, many of them already working on the particular cocoa farm for about 4 years or so. And do you know how much they have made in these past 4 hard years of their young lives? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
With days starting as early as six in the morning and ending late in the evening, being whipped for
working slowly and given minimal food, these kids are suffering. This is not the life that little 12 year olds should be living – carrying machetes and being exposed to harmful chemicals. 40% of the children working on the cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast have never attended school and will probably never get the chance. Without the basic education, these kids have a very little chance of ever breaking free from the encompassing life of slavery on the cocoa farms; little hope of ever breaking the cycle.
I now look at a Hershey’s bar differently. This does not mean that we all have to and are going to stop eating chocolate. That would just be impossible for many of us. But my eyes have been opened to the importance of the other options that are out there such as Fair Trade where all of the cocoa is sourced from Fair Trade small farmers in places like Panama and the Dominican Republic. However, according to Equal Exchange, still only 5% of the world’s cocoa is currently Fair Trade. As stated by the Fair Trade, the big corporations have the responsibility as well as the opportunity to use their power in the cocoa industry to make a difference and change the cocoa industry.
Do your part this Valentine’s Day and by a special Fair Trade chocolate treat for your loved ones 🙂
This is definitely a perspective on chocolate I wish didn’t exist. It’s sometimes hard to imagine such horrific things could go on somewhere in the world when we are living our cushy lives in the United States. I think what’s worse than consumers buying chocolate is companies like Hershey continuing their work because they don’t have the luxury of ignorance. Those companies know exactly where they’re getting their cocoa beans from and they’re refusing to try to make a change. That’s what bothers me the most. They can turn a blind eye to child slavery because money and greed are the only things that can keep their attention.
I remember talking about child labor employed by chocolate companies that outsource to developing countries in AP Geography. Prior to that and your post, I haven’t heard of anyone mention the labor conditions in West Africa. Even though I am a fiend for chocolate, the current tactics employed by businesses like Hershey somewhat turn me off to purchasing the “delicacy.” I think that there have to be labor standards enacted in countries that depend heavily on the influx of cocoa profits, and if not by local governments, then by the companies themselves. Even though labor makes up an enormous portion of business spending, and would impact current profits, you can’t put a price on someone’s physical or mental health. Just like the wave of working standards that hit Western countries several decades ago, there needs to be reform in countries that supply resources to high-profiting businesses.
I had no idea that huge chocolate corporations such as Hershey used the horrific method of slave labor to obtain their chocolate at low prices. I am amazed that this has been going on for this long; these are the types of stories that need to be headlines on the news. I think it should be illegal for Hershey to make and sell their products if they choose to get their cocoa from child slave labor. The lure of a higher profit has turned the world into an ugly place, and the side effects of making more money are certainly not worth it.