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[Below is the original script. But a few changes may have been made during the recording of this audio podcast.]
Chocolate is the food of the gods, according to the ancient Mayans, and a favorite of Halloween trick-or-treaters. But do these sweets come with an environmental price?
The fruit of the cacao tree--native to South and Central America-- is now mostly grown in West Africa. Small farmers tend some 70,000 square kilometers of the tropical trees and produce about 3.5 million tons of the stuff yearly, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. But the trees need shade to survive, so no clear cutting of forests.
Also, such farmers typically don't use fertilizers or pesticides, meaning you can gorge on chocolate to your environmentally-conscious heart's content. Literally, dark chocolate is good for your heart.
So the environmental cost of chocolate isn't in the chocolate itself but in the way it gets to your pumpkin pail: shipping, trucking and all those wrappers destined for the landfill.
There is a human cost as well. Human rights groups such as Save the Children have shown that kids are being enslaved to produce the cocoa. And small farmers don't see much of the $13 billion in chocolate sales money worldwide.
If you want these farmers to get a fair cut, look for brands with the Fair Trade Certified label. It would be quite a trick to hand American children treats derived from African children's slave labor.
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3 Comments
Add Comment"Improved" varieties of cacao tree can be farmed in standalone crops, and a large percentage of them are, nowadays. Those intensive farms do clear rainforests and exhaust and erode the soil; so much so that some of those farms can produce for 2-3 years and then move on to clear more forest, leaving barren land behind.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think the info in this article should be updated accordingly; as long as chocolate remains expensive, poorer regions will do anything tpo provide the cocoa, at any cost.
I can't say I'm surprised by any of this information.. appalled, yes.. disgusted, to a degree, yes.. yet somehow I just can't stop myself from eating chocolate. I guess my love for chocolate somehow outweighs the aforementioned moral & ecological implications.. and in spite of all of this, I can't bring myself to deny children their love for chocolate either. I guess in that sense, it's a sort of double-edged sword. You can either go through life denying yourself the sweet indulgence of chocolate, or support a corrupt exploitative industry.. it kind of reminds me of something. Well a few things actually, the diamond industry for one, the clothing industry, the petroleum industry, and just about any other industry that exploits child labor and/or is a direct cause of harm, both to mankind and the environment. It's something our society needs to address and attempt to remedy, but realistically could never (nor would want to ever) boycott entirely.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy is it not grown in South and Central America in abundance as it once was?
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