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Chocolate Shouldn't be Scary |
By Rodney North, The Answer Man
Halloween is, not surprisingly, one of the three big occasions for buying chocolate each year (the others being Valentine’s Day and Easter). While millions of kids − and not a few adults − in the U.S. will be eating chocolate, children elsewhere will be working on some of the world's two million farms that grow the cocoa needed for all that chocolate. Some of those children work on their own family's farm, but unfortunately many other children are not working in their home communities, or even in their home countries, but rather have been trapped into situations where they're being forced to work against their will, often under dangerous and abusive conditions.
To address this problem, as well as tackle the broader challenge of persistent poverty amongst cocoa farmers, Equal Exchange has encouraged our peers in the cocoa and chocolate industry to adopt Fair Trade practices that will get more of your "chocolate dollar" back to farming families and that will help root out the problem of child slave labor. Since the child labor problem first came to light in 2001, the chocolate industry has been very slow to act and is still, we believe, dragging its feet.
Therefore, last Halloween we partnered with the human rights groups Global Exchange, the International Labor Rights Forum, and others, to create the "Reverse Trick-or-Treating" public education campaign. For the campaign, Equal Exchange distributed 45,000 informational cards and attached a bite-sized piece of our organic Fair Trade chocolate. Volunteers, mostly trick-or-treating families, in 200 cities and towns nationwide then distributed these "reverse" cards to their neighbors as they went door-to-door on Halloween night.
This unorthodox neighbors-teaching-neighbors approach proved to be a big success, albeit on a small scale (you gotta start somewhere). But this year it'll be even bigger. For example, consumer grocery co-ops, and faith-based groups have already signed on to help expand the campaign, and we've committed to producing 200,000 Reverse-Trick-or-Treating cards for volunteers to hand out on Halloween.
To learn more or sign up, go to www.equalexchange.coop/reverse
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