Your chocolate is picked by enslaved kids. | Hacker News Reader

Your chocolate is picked by enslaved kids.

kamikazecookery.com

42 pointsthenomad14 comments

Might as well mention some local chocolate-making startups that pay particular attention to their sourcing in areas with HN readership, to try to avoid this problem:

SF Bay area --- TCHO. Factory and shop between Fisherman's Wharf and the Ferry Building.

Boston area --- Taza. Mexican style chocolate made in Somerville, just over the Cambridge line.

Bonus: the stuff tastes a hell of a lot better than what's on sale in supermarkets.

Clickable: http://www.tcho.com/ http://www.tazachocolate.com/

I've had tcho. It is amazing.

In NYC (Brooklyn, technically), there's Nunu chocolates, which is awesome and each batch comes from a single source of beans.

Are they Fairtrade (or similarly) certified?

- http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/what_is_fairtrade/default.aspx

- http://www.fairtrade.net/ (international site)

Fair trade has been making in-roads in the UK and we do now have mainstream chocolate manufacturers that sell certified fairtrade products as well as the smaller companies that sell only Fairtrade expanding.

Both deal directly with local producers; neither has done the paperwork for full FT certification. Taza's also committed to paying above-market prices, and has an external auditor checking up on them.

FWIW, their own pages on sourcing are here:

Taza: http://www.tazachocolate.com/AboutUs/Taza_Direct_Trade_

TCHO: http://www.tcho.com/tcho-is/faq#17

It's certainly horrible— more horrible, perhaps, is that not buying commercial chocolate isn't going to help those people. There's always a market for slave labor.

Is this a good place to talk about what a socially conscious individual could do to actually fight slavery, rather than just not support it directly? Somehow I feel like writing emails does not have a huge effect.

While those people may not be immediately helped by not buying, we are only directly in control of our own actions. Do we want to participate in a process that supports slave labor? If not, the first responsible action is to stop buying the product. From there, one can find other creative ways to address things.

Let me restate that— Sub-Saharan Africa is not, in general, a nice place to live for a vast number of people. These particular people are involved in the production of a luxury export, so they happen to show up on our radar screen, but the fundamental problems are not being caused by chocolate, and my buying chocolate from someone else, or indeed the collapse of the entire chocolate industry, is probably not going to do a lot more than make me feel better about myself.

So okay, I stop financing slavery. What am I going to do to actually make it stop?

There's a spectrum of responses from buying less-objectionable nutty-crunch bars, to financing a mercenary sweep of chocolate farms and whisking the kids off to an orphanage.

I don't know how effective it is to change buying habits - are elephants any safer now that we don't permit selling ivory in the US?

As dilute as the effect of changing my checkout-counter impluse buy is, so must be diluted the responsibility for the crime. After all, cynically, 90% of the cost of that bar is the transportation and sales cost. So only a penny or so is going toward child-enslavement.

Sadly I fear that on the scale of ineffective responses, blogging comes even further down the list.

Something that the article did not mention is that money from the cocoa exports are used to fund a political war in the Ivory Coast. A few days ago the internationally recognized president there issued a ban on all cocoa and coffee exports in hopes that it will prevent his rival from financing his mercenaries - http://www.timeslive.co.za/africa/article869870.ece/Outtara-...

Much as I'm sympathetic to the subject this is not hacker news and I've flagged it.

I thought about this a bit before I submitted it today. My feeling was that although it's not directly tech-related, chocolate's definitely in the Geek Food Groups, and most HN types I know are concerned with being ethical in their lives, even if they're skeptical of Big Green Movement stuff (as I am).

Nonetheless, totally respect your decision.

HN needs an 'other' category. But I can see why PG keeps it off the site, once you add 'other' everything that is off-topic suddenly is 'on' topic and it would probably take people away from the topical stuff as well as lead to things that cause people to lose respect for each other (politics and such).

Here's the documentary that tells all: http://j.mp/fzlrBu

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