Here is the short article...
"You’ve probably heard of "blood diamonds." But unfortunately diamonds aren’t the only commodity that is produced with slave labor. Many African cocoa produce "blood chocolate," at the cost of cruel labor practices and child abuse.
Africa, especially its Ivory Coast, is the world’s largest cocoa producer, according to a guest post on Treehugger.com by Ted Dworkin of the Global Exchange Fair Trade Online Store. ("The Bitter Truth About Chocolate.")
According to Dworkin, the US State Department has reported slavery on many of these cocoa farms, and the International Institute of Tropical agriculture reported in 2002 that nearly 284,000 children were working under unsafe conditions. Back in the United States chocolate manufacturers often don’t take responsibility for these unsafe working conditions, because they do not own the farms."
More and more people are becoming aware of this problem, which has started a chain reaction of chocolate brands on insisting slave-free chocolate. Since these big manufactures don't own these cocoa farms, they don't really take responsibility in making sure the work environment is safe. But Cadbury has decided that they plan to offer fair-trade certification on their most popular chocolate bar by the end of this summer. This is a huge step since their are very many organic/fair-trade chocolate at the local supermarket.
If you want to find out if your favorite chocolate brands are fair trade or not, click on this
Fair-Trade chocolate link!
So now I'm going to think twice before contributing to my chocolate cravings, and I'm going to make sure I see a fair-trade and organic label on the back of my chocolate bare before I eat it!
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