Slave-free Chocolate: Who’s making your sweets?

by Barbara Murray, February 26th, 2008, 5:06 am

Nestled in that red heart-shaped box of bon-bons you received this past Valentine’s Day is a boatload of guilt. It’s not just the calories — our waistlines and cholesterol counts having barely recovered from our Christmas/Hanukah/New Year’s eating extravaganzas — but it’s also knowing that there are people in the world, including children as young as nine, who are forced into slavery and made to pick the cocoa beans used to make those glistening chocolates you were so lovingly given. It’s enough to make your heart break. (See, for example, the BBC documentary, Slavery: A Global Investigation.)

Human rights and advocacy groups, such as Global Exchange, Stop the Traffik, and Save the Children, have been active in fighting for slave-free chocolate for some time and have campaigns to raise awareness and to urge companies to take part in fair-trade agreements whereby farmers are paid market prices for their crops. These groups state that without minimum pricing to ensure steady income, farmers are not likely to make changes to their labor practices.

Slave-free chocolate is a horrible term but it describes a horrible exploitation. Any number of food companies, including Ben and Jerry’s, Endangered Species Chocolate, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods, use fair-trade chocolate in some or all of their products. But what about the big candy companies?

Hershey and Mars, for instance, control some two-thirds of the U.S. chocolate market, which generated $11.3 billion in sales in 2003 (the last year for which the Chocolate Manufacturers Association posts figures). Both companies, along with other major producers like Nestlé, Archer Daniels Midland, Cadbury, Guittard and Barry Callebaut, import cocoa beans from the Ivory Coast, which, as the largest cocoa producer in the world, provides almost half the cocoa beans that end up in the US. Most of that cocoa comes from farms of 12 acres or smaller.

According to its Web site, Hershey says it works with its industry partners, governments and international agencies, and the farmers themselves to promote economic and social programs.

As the largest chocolate company in the world, Mars comes under particular international scrutiny for its cocoa-buying practices. Although Mars is privately held and therefore does not release revenue figures, Forbes estimates that the McLean, Virginia-based company’s sales hovered around the $21 billon mark for 2007. Surely, the company can pay farmers a fair wage. And according to a statement on the company Web site dated September 2007, the company is involved in programs that provide economic, educational, and environmental assistance to cocoa farms in West Africa.

These corporate statements (other companies post them as well) read all warm and fuzzy, but just where and how companies implement their fair-trade practices is hard to pin down. And in a perhaps related note, the European Commission, the Canadian Competition Bureau, and the US Department of Justice are currently looking into the possible price-fixing practices of Mars and Hershey. Pardon my skepticism, but if they’re fixing prices at the selling end of things, how honest are they at the buying end?