I have several passes to Bag It! http://www.anarreshealth.ca/node/893 and I am offering them to the winner(s) of this contest. You'll get an entry for every action you take. Tell me what you did in comments to this blog entry and I'll enter you in my contest.
You get one entry for reading the article here: http://www.johnrobbins.info/blog/is-there-slavery-in-your-chocolate/
You get an entry for every action you take below; an entry for every article you read, every article you post or forward, every letter you write, every time you point out that a chocolate bar was made with children's slave labour, every organization you join! So tell me what you did, and your good deeds will add up!
For every dozen actions taken, I'll add a prize: fairly traded cocoa butter, coconut oil, shea butter and workshops using these wonderful life affirming ingredients.
Happy RRRevolutions!
Tracey
Companies whose chocolate is almost certainly tainted with child slavery include: M&M Mars and Hershey Foods Corp, ADM Cocoa, Ben & Jerry’s, Cadbury Ltd., Chocolates by Bernard Callebaut, Fowler’s Chocolate, Godiva, Guittard Chocolate Company, Kraft, Nestle, See’s Candies, The Chocolate Vault, and Toblerone.
Seven Things You Can Do
1) Educate yourself further. Good sources of information include:
* Global Exchange (www.globalexchange.org)
* The Child Labor Coalition (www.stopchildlabor.org)
* Anti-Slavery (www.antislavery.org)
* Unfair Trade (www.unfairtrade.co.uk)
* Fair Trade (www.fairtrade.org/html/english.html)
* Abolish: The Anti-Slavery Portal (www.iabolish.com)
* For information on specific chocolate companies, see www.radicalthought.org
* Kevin Bales’ book Disposable People (University of California Press, 2000) is a thoroughly researched expose of modern day slavery.
2) Write a letter to the editor or an article in your local newspaper.
3) Buy Fair Trade chocolate and/or coffee for gifts that show you care about fairness for everyone. Or sell Fair Trade chocolate and/or coffee as a fundraiser for your church, school, or community group.
Fair Trade chocolate is available at http://store.globalexchange.org/chocolate.html
Fair Trade coffee is available at http://store.globalexchange.org/peace.html
4) Get stores in your community to carry Fair Trade chocolate and coffee. For support, email fairtrade@globalexchange.org
5) Contact the big chocolate companies, and ask them to buy Fair Trade cocoa. Hershey Foods Corp. can be reached at 100 Crystal A Drive, Hershey, PA 17033; (717) 534-6799. Mars, Inc. can be reached at 6885 Elm Street, McLean, VA 22101; (703) 821-4900. Tell them that you expect something to be done immediately to ensure that cocoa imported into the U.S. is not harvested by enslaved children.
6) Support the Fair Trade campaign by joining organizations such as Global Exchange. They can be reached at 2017 Mission Street, #303, San Francisco, California 94110; (415) 255-7296; info@globalexchange.org
7) Support the anti-slavery movement by joining organizations such as Anti-Slavery International. They can be reached in the U.S. at Suite 312—CIP, 1755 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036-2102. The main office is Anti-Slavery International, Thomas Clarkson House, The Stableyard, Broomgrove Road, London SW9 9TL, England
John Robbins is the author of The Food Revolution and Diet For A New America.
He can be contacted through the website johnrobbins.info