Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, but more scary than ghosts and ghouls is that our festivities are supporting child labor.
Order a Fair Trade Trick or Treat Action Kit!
Halloween is the time when chocolate companies like Nestle USA enjoy their biggest sales to children. Unfortunately, chocolate is no treat for the hundreds of thousands of child cocoa laborers that work helping their families on farms or even toil as slaves. Illegal child labor is a major problem at cocoa farms in West Africa, especially the Ivory Coast, which supplies 40 percent of the world’s cocoa.
There is a solution — Fair Trade Certified Chocolate! Fair Trade guarantees farmers a fair price for their cocoa, so they can feed their families and keep their kids in school. Fair Trade does not allow abusive child labor or forced labor.
Global Exchange’s Fair Trade Trick or Treat Action Kit includes a bag of Equal Exchange Fair Trade chocolate candy (42 individual pieces); 42 festive Fair Trade kids postcards addressed to Nestle CEO Brad Alford; traditional papel picado Mexican party streamers; and a large, colorful Fair Trade is Boo-tiful poster, all bundled together in a Halloween bag perfect for Trick or Treating! *If you already have Fair Trade trick-or-treat candy and decorations, email fairtrade@globalexchange.org for a complimentary poster and kids postcards.
To learn more, check out this article, Child labour still key ingredient to chocolate industry: report or look for a screening near you of The Dark Side of Chocolate, the new film exposing the ongoing use of child, forced, and trafficked labor in the West African cocoa industry.
P.S. While they do not have a Halloween package, I can personally recommend the delicious Nicaraguan chocolate from El Castillo del Cacao. Great any time of year!