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The International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) has been campaigning hard to end child slavery in the chocolate industry. Now the US government has asked it to help ensure that cocoa imported into America is ’slave free’. Earlier this month, the US named cocoa farming as an industry in which child labour was prevalent.
But, the chocolate companies still think they can get away with keeping their customers in the dark about the origins of their raw products. Green and Blacks finely wrapped organic chocolate fails to tell us where the cocoa is grown. If it’s so good, why the secrecy?
4 Responses to “Cocoa slavery — getting there”
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September 27th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
Dear Humphrey,
Given the following two choices, which is worse: (1) Forcing a child slave to work in a chocolate factory; or (2) Leaving the child with no income and no protection?
John J. Xenakis
GenerationalDynamics.com
September 28th, 2009 at 8:18 am
But John, a slave has no income. The children I met had no protection. Are you saying that this is the only choice the chocolate industry has when caring for those who farm its raw product?
September 29th, 2009 at 3:16 am
Dear Humphrey,
> But John, a slave has no income. The children I met had no
> protection. Are you saying that this is the only choice the
> chocolate industry has when caring for those who farm its raw
> product?
You know, my heart really agrees with you, so I’m really taking a kind of “devil’s advocate” position.
Frankly, this is an ethical question that’s always bothered me. Is slavery really worse than starving to death? Is slavery really worse than being homeless and subject to constant violence?
Let’s take the situation that you’ve presented. If I were running a chocolate factory in a place where there were a lot of homeless children starving and beaten in the streets, then I might be inclined to think that I was giving them a better life by putting them to work as slaves in my factory.
* I would want to take care of them, just as I take care of all my possessions.
* I wouldn’t want them to spread disease to one another, so I’d want to give them a clean place to live.
* I wouldn’t want them to die, so I’d feed them.
* I would want them to work hard all day, so I’d give them a comfortable place to sleep during the night.
* I wouldn’t want them to commit suicide, so I’d want to provide some minimal rest periods or entertainment.
* I would be providing them with some factory skills that they could use to get a job as adults.
In the 1850s debate between the North and the South that preceded the American Civil War, the Southerners argued that the factory economy of the North was more cruel in many ways than slavery — unemployed people could starve and become ill, and elderly people had no one to care for them. This was contrasted to the fact that even sick or elderly slaves in the south still had a home and people to take care of them. So the Southerners argued that, however bad slavery was, the Northern factory life was worse.
(I would add, as an ironic footnote to this discussion, that Britain almost became one of the belligerents in the American Civil War — on the side of the South! So 1860s Brits could not have considered slavery so horrible, and may even have agreed that factory life was more cruel than slavery.)
Nobody wants to see a child working as a slave in a factory, but no one wants to see a homeless, hungry child either. When those are the choices, which is better?
John J. Xenakis
GenerationalDynamics.com
October 22nd, 2009 at 9:16 pm
Well, I’ll make this short. ,