my sometimes-skeptical social commentary

I spoke to a good friend of mine last night, who made me aware that today marks the deadline the chocolate industry set for itself of putting an end to the use of slave-produced cacao beans for chocolate.

Here’s a quote from an article in the Time magazine about it: …in Cote d’Ivoire, which produces some 40% of the world’s cocoa, tens of thousands of children are forced to work on plantations, many of them in virtual slavery….

More info is online at wikipedia.org: “Of the 200,000 children working in the Ivory Coast cocoa industry, a maximum of 6% (12,000 children) may be victims of human trafficking or slavery.” (Wikipedia links to this article.)

Here’s another article.

And here’s another article.

Today, I’m going to try to find a local store that sells chocolate that is not made from cocoa beans grown by slaves. My friend is asking everyone he knows to buy two such chocolate bars: One to keep, and one to give to someone else, to spread the word about the slave conditions, but also to show people that there are alternatives to slave-made chocolate.

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