Storied Theology

It’s Halloween season. In my world this translates into candy season. Actually, I’m not a huge candy guy. I pretty much have my needs met in this department by Twizzlers for movie-watching, and chocolate to accompany the right red wine, port, or stout beer.

Chocolate. There’s the rub.

In honor of our great day to honor sweetness and gluttony, we hosted a viewing of The Dark Side of Chocolate.

The film documents the prevalence, and even the process, of enslaving children to work in the cacao plantations of the Ivory Coast. A child can be procured for less than 250 Euros ($350 Dollars U.S.). Delivered.

Of course, children smuggled in from the surrounding countries are not paid. Or educated. Or taught the local language.

Ivory Coast produces over 1/3 of the worlds cocoa. And it is widely understood that their practices of child slavery are not unique.

Child slaves are the labor force that provides you withe very Snickers, Hersheys Bar, Mars Bar, Kraft Bakers chocolate, and brownie mix we use to give ourselves our chocolate fix.

Here’s the deal: the U.N. and Interpol know, they create agreements, and at times even work to enforce bans on child slavery.

The corporations who produce chocolate know. But they simply do not care. Their job is not to bring morally upright products to market. Their job is to make money.

There is only one way to make the corporations care: start buying only fairly traded, slave-free chocolate. How can you do this?

• When you have a choice, only buy fair trade.
• If your grocery store does not offer fair trade options, ask the manager for it and then leave the store without purchasing chocolate.
• When you store gets it, buy it.

This simple practice is more likely to make a difference in the trafficking of children than writing letters to congress, picketing in front of the U.N. or sending $25 to an anti-slavery organization.

Slave owners will keep using slaves, and corporations will continue to profit off of the cheap labor they provide, until the world-wide market tells them that we will not fund their slave plantations.

A couple of years ago, Laura read Julie Clawson’s Everyday Justice.

Since then, we have made a commitment to purchase only fairly traded coffee, chocolate, and bananas. This means that we eat a lot fewer bananas (fair trade is hard to find, and expensive) and less chocolate (ditto). But by expressing our need for fair trade to the manager of our local market, we also have been able to cultivate a regular supplier: there is always fair trade chocolate at the store, now, and there are regularly fairly traded bananas as well.

When I see huge global issues like child slavery, I often feel helpless. I am overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem, and the ways that the would-be enforcers of law are complicit in the evils.

But with child slavery for the foods we want to eat every day there is something we can do. And I don’t just mean that we can avoid the stuff produced by slaves while the rest of the world profits from it and consumes it. I mean that a growing wave of people who refuse to eat the products of child slavery will make a sufficient dent in corporate earnings to change the slave culture of the chocolate, coffee, and banana industries.

Why not sit down with the family tonight over dinner and talk it through? Do you think that you, your spouse, and your kids would be willing to eat fewer bananas, drink a bit less coffee, eat less chocolate, so that your dollars will be funneled to fairly paid workers rather than slave-holding plantation owners?

If you were this global neighbor of yours, what would you want done unto you?