When I lived with my family in Florida I often saw migrant farm workers in nearby tomato fields. As I grew up, I began to read about organic products and the fair-trade movement, which supports a fair price for products, environmental sustainability and better treatment of the people that work the fields in developing countries. One of the biggest fair trade causes surrounds ending the abuse of child workers and putting a stop to modern-day slavery.
It breaks my heart to think of children in Nicaragua or West Africa slaving away to produce the delicious cocoa that is turned into my favorite chocolate bars. Although child labor has technically been illegal since the implementation of the Cocoa Protocol in 2001, it is still happening across the globe. With celebrities like Eva Longoria speaking up against it, it’s more important than ever to buy fair-trade—for your environment and community.
Here in the US there is a growing number of Latino celebrities who are joining causes like Eva Longoria’s support of the Children’s Act for Responsible Employment (CARE Act). She even produced a new documentary, The Harvest/La Cosecha: The Children Who Feed America, along with Shine Global.
We all love chocolate, don’t we? But the news of the continuation of child abuse to make it has me considering what I could be doing to help the situation. In “Chocolate’s Child Slaves”, CNN explores what is happening to children working in the cocoa fields in the Ivory Coast of Africa.The first step is to learn to be a more responsible global citizen and buy fair-trade products as much as possible. Although fair-trade chocolate can be hard to find, Eva Longoria and the CNN documentary have inspired me to look for those labels. Those products may cost a little extra, but the money coming out of my pocket doesn’t compare to the true human cost of chocolate.
How often do you buy organic, local or fair-trade products that benefit the environment and worker conditions?
Image via ITA Image Library/flickr