Tag Archives: child labor

Systemic Racism and it’s Lack of Coverage in Early Education Systems

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The United States education system grooms its young students to view racism as a dark part of our country’s past. Through white-washed lessons hardly covering the full scope of slavery

A scene from the film adaptation of Harper Lee’s well known book, “To Kill a Mockingbird”

and assigned readings of glorified tales like To Kill a Mockingbird, our education programs are an insult to our nation’s Black community who continues to face devastating violence and racism. Systemic racism is embedded throughout our society’s systems in healthcare, education, incarceration, and housing. Not until recently, did I discover the various avenues racism pervades throughout the world food system.

This course has responsibly educated its students how the food industry is saturated in racial inequities. Beginning with employment, Raj Patel’s research highlights how the Black community is substantially underrepresented in the food industry’s managerial positions. Many like to believe that the unlawful practice of

Raj Patel’s research presented in “The Color of Food”

employment discrimination would deter this behavior but looking at the unequal wage gap, lack of diversity in hiring, and rare job promotion opportunities reveals the contrary. Systemic racism also infiltrates chocolate, American’s favorite commodity. American mega-chocolate corporations’ successful profits are a result of abusive African child labor practices along the Ivory Coast. This is another area where the U.S. looks hypocritical for championing the values of opportunity and freedom yet doesn’t uphold that for their relationships with nations beyond its borders.

As a Palestinian American, I empathize with the black community and their fight against systemic racism. Like the Black community, Palestinians understand systemic violence under the power of an oppressive government and have shown remarkable solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement overseas. I am proud to be a part of a culture that is intolerant of

Palestinians protesting their support for Black Lives Matter overseas. Image Belongs To: https://www.dw.com/en/fatal-police-shooting-of-autistic-palestinian-sparks-outrage/a-53723002

racism and injustice and represents this through peaceful protest. The demoralizing narratives that plague Palestinians and the Black community serves to saturate false public perceptions of these communities. In order to rectify this, education needs to unlock stories like, Freedom Farmers, which disrupts the harmful narrative that Black farmers have oppressive ties to agriculture due to slavery and contradictorily focuses on how these farmers have powerfully utilized their land for activism, resilience, and survival against white supremacy and economic exploitation. Racism is clearly not a fixture in the past, but remains a problem in our present, and will continue to be a virus infecting our future if we’re not fully educated on how it pervades throughout the systems in our society.

The Blissful Oblivion to the Bitter Journey of Chocolate

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Striking my spoon against the delicate layer, reveals a precious crevice oozing with a rich velvety chocolate sauce. Despite the popular choice of pizza off the Domino’s menu, my item of choice is the chocolate lava cake. Indulging in the decadent, sweet sensations, I have become blissfully oblivious to the bitter journey this chocolate has undergone. 

The children working in the cocao farms along the Ivory Coast

The children working in the cacao farms along the Ivory Coast. Photo belongs to: https://www.raconteur.net/business-innovation/child-labour-cocoa-production

For such a sweet pleasure, chocolate possesses a complex, commodity chain. This journey begins at its oppressive roots within the African cacao farms employment of over 800,000 children along the Ivory Coast. This mass scale child labor workforce has prompted me to question who should be held accountable for this injustice. Is it the chocolate mega corporations who have plenty of resources to rectify the immorality of their success? Or does this responsibility fall onto me and other consumers, contributing consumers that provide dollar incentive to continue the unjust practices of the chocolate industry?  

It would be a lie to say that I will stop eating chocolate now that I know of the inequalities occurring. This new found knowledge has given me the drive to do my own research on ethical chocolate companies that stand against child labor business practices. To combat the guilt I feel, I want to target my consumer dollars on principled businesses. Through these contemplative practices, I have gained insights into my own 

Labels on chocolate bars indicating their ethical company values. Photo belongs to: https://blog.equalexchange.coop/child-labor-in-the-cocoa-industry/

personal autonomy. I have the power to support organizations, movements, and companies that I am morally aligned with. These contemplative practices evoke questions, bring cognizance to disparities present in the food system and how my actions make an impact. I would like to end this post by reiterating a lesson from my favorite childhood movie, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: don’t let tempting, gluttonous vices cloud your vision of acting virtuously. 

 

The Real Cost of Chocolate

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As I sat at my dining room table, with the fluorescent blue-light of my laptop staring back at me, I felt consumed by guilt. The video I had just watched completely transformed my perspective on America’s favorite candy forever. Although I was instructed to place the chocolate on my tongue, I found myself hesitating; I suddenly saw the delicious morsel in my hand through a completely different lens. Before this film, when I thought of chocolate, I would think of the small joys it had brought me as a child; all of the Valentine’s days, Halloweens and movie nights where the main appeal to me was the chocolate involved. It’s decadent texture, rich flavor and comforting aroma were no longer the main qualities I associated with this treat. Rather, I thought of how I purchased the product of another sleepless night for a small farmer, wondering how he would make ends meet. I would bite

A young boy uses a machete to break cocoa pods at a farm near Abengourou in eastern Ivory Coast in December. PHOTOGRAPHS BY BENJAMIN LOWY

A young boy uses a machete to break cocoa pods at a farm near Abengourou in eastern Ivory Coast in December. PHOTOGRAPHS BY BENJAMIN LOWY

into the calloused hands of a child who instead of sitting in a classroom was in the fields, having to slash open cocoa pods with a machete. I would have to unpackage the systematic exploitation of Africa’s people and resource rich land. Ultimately, I would have to come to terms with the fact that by purchasing the chocolate, my money went towards the exploitation of human beings.

Globalization has greatly altered our relationship with food in many ways. We are now able to be completely disconnected with the source of our food, and in turn disconnected with the many horrors and injustices that take place in the world food system. Dismantling these systems will not be an easy feat, especially since multi-billion-dollar corporations are at the heart of the issue. However, we can work towards a better future for small farmers and children by purchasing from companies that value the health and wellness of their employees before their bank accounts. For example, Theo is a chocolate company based in Seattle that prioritizes purchasing from smallholder farms, and produces ethically sourced, fair-trade and organic chocolates. In 2019, all of the 1,225 metric tons of cocoa they purchased came from the community of Watalinga in the Eastern Democratic

A woman holds up one of Theos chocolate packaging

A woman holds up one of Theos chocolate packaging

Republic of Congo. You can explore their 2019 Theo Impact Report for more information on the impact of their business practices.

My Guilty Pleasure

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Out of all the contemplative practices, my attention was captured particularly by chocolate. I have always appreciated and indulged every single chocolate I have laid my hands on – up until recently. It is both haunting and disturbing; the inhumane activities such as exploitation of workers and child labor associated with something that brings most people pleasure. This contemplative practice made me feel  empathetic to those children who are impoverished and stripped away from their childhood – which prevents them from attending school and living a normal life, spending most of their time working in cacao farms. 

source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/business/hershey-nestle-mars-chocolate-child-labor-west-africa/

After witnessing the video of Ivory Coast cacao growers tasting chocolate for the first time and child labor in cacao production, I instantly felt guilt – being a consumer supporting products that are sourced from people that are exploited and had been taken advantage of. Eating chocolate suddenly becomes difficult, thinking about farmers’ lack of privilege to taste chocolate – when their product is its number one ingredient.

Cacao is a multi-billion dollar industry, and yet growers in Ivory Coast are employing children (free labor) but still struggle to make enough profit to provide for their families. Considering the amount of money and power the chocolate industry possess, they most certainly have the upper hand to prevent child labor and exploitation of farm workers by providing a fair and just wage in exchange for their product.

This situation in the chocolate industry is something that I was not aware of prior to the contemplative practice addressing it. This shows that these practices may be difficult to understand for most people like myself, but it is a very useful tool to contemplate the big picture behind things. This specific contemplative practice about chocolate encouraged me to see through a bar of chocolate and think about the unjust practices associated with it as well as the actions that should be implemented to resolve it.

 

From Harvest to Consumption: A Bittersweet Tale

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I recently spent some time in Cape Town, South Africa. There I had two professors, a husband and wife, both from the area. I quickly noticed that they did not have conventional wedding bands. Rather, they had outlines of wedding bands tattooed on their fingers. Toward the end of the academic quarter I discovered why this was. The mining history in South Africa is a horribly devastating one; black South Africans had been forced into mining jobs, paid little to nothing, and lived in treacherous conditions. The legacy of the mining industry impacts individuals and families to this day. So, my professors abstained from the traditional gold or diamond bands in protest and demonstrated their loving connection with tattooed wedding bands instead.

Two men eating their rations in a shanty town created for miners to live in for most of the year (https://showme.co.za/facts-about-south-africa/history-of-south-africa/the-history-of-south-africa/)

Although this anecdote might seem random or even irrelevant, it is what came up in my mind when engaging with the chocolate contemplative practice. Why? The bitter sweetness of the chocolate, both in taste and through its commodity chain is shared with the wedding band. Both are a sort of celebration, a dessert and a union of love. Both have seen, and still see terrible injustices and human rights abuses in their commodity chains. Both require an immense amount of water and fossil fuels. In both cases, the harvesters and primary suppliers, the “beginning” of these global commodity chains, often never have the opportunity to see the final result of their grueling work—chocolate or wedding bands. Just as the food we consume embodies water, so does our consumption of other goods.

A child rakes cocoa beans on a drying rack, demonstrating the child labor frequently used in chocolate’s commodity chain (https://www.ethical.org.au/get-informed/issues/animal-testing/young-boy-rakes-cocoa-beans-on-a-drying-rack/)

This contemplative practice prodded me to think about our own responsibility in the commodity chain. Should we model ourselves after my professors? Should I stop my father from consuming his ritual post-dinner chocolate bar each night? The contemplative practice did not lead me to a final and perfect answer, but it did allow me to consider one family’s response to the injustices of a different commodity chain, offering me insight into what I believe is the right thing to do. Ultimately, this is the starting point. This is the headspace from which we can begin to consider how to alter our personal behavior to support what is right for the environment and for other human beings.

– Sophie Stein

Chocolate and Trafficking: Producing Anxieties over the Chocolate Industry

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Whether it crunches, snaps, or melts– chocolate varieties have much of the same impact on global populations that harvest it. Human trafficking and child labour pervade the chocolate industry, with U.S. Department of Labour estimates citing over 2 million child labourers engaged in the dangerous task of harvesting cocoa beans. 

For me, hearing this is nothing new.

In 2015, I first engaged with a non-profit called Dressember-– a non-profit that seeks to eradicate human trafficking by calling attention to unethical fashion production. Dressember also raises awareness for other unethical industries. They even promote ethical alternatives to chocolate, coffee, and clothing brands. 

Infographic via dressember.org 

Despite knowing this, going into this contemplative practice was still even more difficult to process as I watched farmworkers taste for the first time the product that they didn’t even know was being produced from their labour. This produced a certain anxiety that I recognized immediately– if farmers don’t know where their product is going, and if populations largely don’t understand where it is coming from, how can we generate awareness for labour injustices like these? How can we promote more transparency in the supply chain to ensure human rights protections? These are things I wonder as I sit behind my screen, with the privilege of simply contemplating, allowing myself to entertain ideas of socially just practices. But how is this put into action?

Among increasingly conflicting ideas about globalization and “fair trade”, I found it hard to connect myself to an immediate solution during this exercise. The contemplative practice connected me to the true complexity of the issue. Damaging and unsustainable practices give me insight into the ecological blindness that companies operate with, but with child labour, this opens us to the ethical blindness that companies operate with, viewing human bodies and children as dispensable lives.

The Privilege in Contemplating Chocolate

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Contemplating chocolate before eating it seems like something quite odd to do, however it is important to take the time to consider the implications of our eating and in the words of Michal Pollan, consider how eating is a political act.

During my contemplative practice, I was struck mostly by the video about cacao farmer N’Da Alphonse in Ivory Coast, and his first ever taste of a chocolate bar. The reality – both convicting and surprising – that the man who grows the cocoa which is eaten all around the world as chocolate has never had the privilege of tasting his own product. I felt disturbed, confused, and frustrated thinking about the injustice that surrounds the growth and sales of chocolate. I also thought about globalization (which we often discuss in this class) and as depicted in the image below, how the system has ravaged many developing populations for the cost-benefit of first-world nations.

One of the ways in which globalization has impacted the world is in the centralized purchase of goods that settle for low prices, high efficiency, and large profits. This has resulted in what we call global capitalism, which is exemplified in the fact that 147 of the world’s corporations and investment groups controlled 40 percent of corporate wealth, and just over 700 control nearly all of it (80 percent). This corrupt version of capitalism monopolizes power and resources, often leaving farmers in developing countries behind with scathingly low pay, unsafe working conditions, long hours, and abusive child labor. In fact, around two million children work in dangerous conditions unpaid on cocoa plantations in West Africa. This brings into light even more the injustice and lack of food sovereignty that the global commodity food chain has created for the majority of developing countries around the world.

 

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEN4hcZutO0 https://www.cornucopia.org/2008/11/michael-pollan-eating-is-a-political-act/ https://www.thoughtco.com/why-is-global-capitalism-bad-3026085 https://www.thoughtco.com/all-about-the-global-chocolate-industry-3026238