As the summer heats up, chocolate lovers across the country will be celebrating the season with a favorite BBQ treat: smores. These delicious snacks with graham crackers, toasted marshmallows and chocolate bring joy and happiness to children especially, but they may be linked to the exploitation of children in West Africa. The good news is that just as you can make your smores with marshmallows toasted just to your liking, you can also cook yours up with chocolate that reflects your values.
Ten years ago, reports first surfaced about child labor, forced labor and trafficking in West Africas cocoa industry, the largest cocoa producing area in the world. Chocolate companies signed a voluntary agreement committing to ending abusive child labor and forced labor in their cocoa supply chains by 2005, but almost ten years later the abuses continue.
A research team from Tulane University that investigated company initiatives to address these abuses in West Africa under a contract from the US Department of Labor found that children are trafficked from countries like Mali and Burkina Faso into the cocoa farms of Cote dIvoire to produce the primary ingredient in chocolate. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of children in Cote dIvoire and Ghana were found to be working in hazardous conditions.
In order to address the exploitation that continues to fuel the cocoa industry, chocolate companies are increasingly committing to using cocoa that has been independently certified to comply with international labor rights standards. For example, Fair Trade Certified cocoa bans the use of child labor, while also providing cocoa farmers with a higher price for their beans which helps to improving living and working conditions while easing the pressure to rely on child workers. Fair Trade also provides farmers, organized into democratically-run cooperatives, with a premium that they use to fund community projects like training and social programs.
In fact, the top recommendation for companies in the final report from Tulane University is to continue to scale up its consumption and publically commit to new procurement targets of product certified cocoa specifically in the U.S. market.
This summer, the International Labor Rights Forum, Global Exchange and Green America are sponsoring a fun activity called We Want More from our Smores. As part of the campaign, people across the country are making their smores using Fair Trade Certified chocolate while educating their communities about the problems in the cocoa industry and asking chocolate companies to support responsible cocoa sourcing policies like using Fair Trade cocoa.
Its easy and fun to participate and July 4th BBQs are the perfect opportunity to join. You can find all the details online here. You can also spread the word by joining Change.org in asking celebrity chefs to post recipes for Fair Trade smores.
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