Lanky Livingston
Guest
Something to think about this Halloween before buying your candy.
*****************************
If you spend four minutes with my children, you will know that Halloween is in 29 days. This is because they are children, and who wouldn’t love a holiday that involves dressing up like beloved characters, animals, or icons and collecting candy in a bag? Dress up plus sweets? Sign me up, they say.
Well, despite how I feel about the holiday (ahem—keeping a jar of candy each per kid; giving the rest away while we recover for the next three days), it’s a fun way to get out in the community, enjoy the fall, and create family memories. I just go with it.
But I’m gonna pull back the curtain behind the wizard here for this month’s Intellectual Grownup post, and it’s one of those inconvenient truths that I wish we could ignore. But we can’t. Because friends, it’s real, it’s rampant, and not enough well-meaning families know about the reality behind their shiny-foiled wrappers.
The far majority of chocolate is in our stores because of forced child labor. And unless we tell the guilty companies that this isn’t okay, this will keep happening.
So this means that the majority of the chocolate candy in your kids’ Halloween bag will be because of child labor, and often child slavery. But this also means there’s a simple but powerful thing you can do as a family to not contribute to the epidemic issue. More on that at the end.
In 2001, various news sources revealed that children were being used as slaves or cheap labor in West African cocoa farms, where the majority of the world’s cocoa is birthed. Lawmakers in the U.S. tried to enact laws to require change, but the farthest they got was a voluntary protocol (the Harken-Engel Protocol, to be exact), signed by heads of major chocolate companies, to ask for the stop of child labor “as a matter of urgency.”
Well, this pretty-please request was more or less ignored, and more than ten years later, there are still over a million children working on cocoa farms with little more than the torn clothes on their backs. Their hands and faces are often sliced with machete scars, evidence of the main tool they use to cut down the cocoa from trees after shimmying up the trunk (and also used to split open the cocoa pod).
Click link for the rest.
*****************************
If you spend four minutes with my children, you will know that Halloween is in 29 days. This is because they are children, and who wouldn’t love a holiday that involves dressing up like beloved characters, animals, or icons and collecting candy in a bag? Dress up plus sweets? Sign me up, they say.
Well, despite how I feel about the holiday (ahem—keeping a jar of candy each per kid; giving the rest away while we recover for the next three days), it’s a fun way to get out in the community, enjoy the fall, and create family memories. I just go with it.
But I’m gonna pull back the curtain behind the wizard here for this month’s Intellectual Grownup post, and it’s one of those inconvenient truths that I wish we could ignore. But we can’t. Because friends, it’s real, it’s rampant, and not enough well-meaning families know about the reality behind their shiny-foiled wrappers.
The far majority of chocolate is in our stores because of forced child labor. And unless we tell the guilty companies that this isn’t okay, this will keep happening.
So this means that the majority of the chocolate candy in your kids’ Halloween bag will be because of child labor, and often child slavery. But this also means there’s a simple but powerful thing you can do as a family to not contribute to the epidemic issue. More on that at the end.
In 2001, various news sources revealed that children were being used as slaves or cheap labor in West African cocoa farms, where the majority of the world’s cocoa is birthed. Lawmakers in the U.S. tried to enact laws to require change, but the farthest they got was a voluntary protocol (the Harken-Engel Protocol, to be exact), signed by heads of major chocolate companies, to ask for the stop of child labor “as a matter of urgency.”
Well, this pretty-please request was more or less ignored, and more than ten years later, there are still over a million children working on cocoa farms with little more than the torn clothes on their backs. Their hands and faces are often sliced with machete scars, evidence of the main tool they use to cut down the cocoa from trees after shimmying up the trunk (and also used to split open the cocoa pod).
Click link for the rest.