It has been estimated that more than 40% of the world’s chocolate is manufactured using west African cocoa harvested by young boys lured away from their homes to be sold as slaves. Did you know that? I mean, I always thought I was pretty up to date with what’s going on in the world, and I definitely didn’t know that. That’s pretty much why this site exists.
I’ve been sitting on this topic for the better part of a month now, and this is what I’ve gathered: the chocolate industry is such that tracing the origin of cocoa is very difficult, and so conclusively identifying culprits has been difficult. Despite this, Nestle has been cited time and time again as one of the most clear offenders in this practice, and according to The Better World Shopping Guide, they are the absolute worst. In addition to the well-documented use of forced labor by children, Nestle has also been implicated in hostile takeovers of family farms and repeatedly accused of launching greenwashing campaigns to mask their destructive practices rather than correct them. In 2001, the company signed the Cocoa Protocol, promising to find a way by July 2005 to certify that their chocolate did not contain cocoa produced by underaged, forced labor. The date has long since come and gone, and all anyone appears to have gotten from Nestle is lip service about the difficulty of the task.
I expect to follow up on this post in the future because it’s kind of a pet issue for me, but in the meantime I have decided to buy organic when I can, buy from the list below when it’s more practical, and buy from Nestle never.
I went to Whole Foods this week (ahhh, delicious research) to buy some chocolate from Endangered Species and Rapunzel, two of the companies most celebrated in the industry for their social responsibility. I wanted to try some organic chocolate before I made any attempt to recommend it on this site, but I certainly didn’t think I’d switch…until I had some. I will try not to get too enthusiastic about my sweet tooth in the context of child labor, but suffice it to say that I have seen heaven, and it is glorious.
Cocoa is one of the most heavily sprayed crops in the world so it makes sense to buy organic, but if you’re short on suppliers/funds, you might try Cadbury, Hershey’s, Russel Stover, Whitman’s, Ghiarardeli, Lindt, or Droste…all in The Better World Shopping Guide’s next tier for social consciousness. There are no guarantees that these companies are completely innocent, but it doesn’t take an economist to predict what would happen if all the CAs of the world stopped buying Nestle products. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like a single Nestle product that doesn’t have a major competitor, so this quiet boycott really has not changed my lifestyle at all.
