Reverse Trick or Treating

* This is a long, but informative article that I received from an e-newsletter by National Geographic. I signed up our family to do the reverse trick or treating that it mentions. There is a website at the bottom you can check out. This is worth reading.

Keep Halloween Fair
by Solvie Karlstrom

Halloween should be scary, but only for a day. Unfortunately, holiday treats can contribute to a witch's cauldron of frightening problems that persist long after the masks come off.

Pesticides and fertilizers used in the production of sugar have led to the destruction of aquatic ecosystems. The loss of topsoil to cane fields has destroyed forest habitats. But sugar's sins start with the slave trade, as Europeans brought captured Africans to work in the cane fields of the Caribbean throughout the 18th century, where slaves died in greater numbers than in the U.S. Sadly, this legacy hasn't come to an end: The chocolate trade has encouraged forced labor in Africa as cocoa farmers sell their product at prices well below what they can afford.

Forty-three percent of the world's cocoa is produced in the Ivory Coast, where over a quarter of a million children work on cocoa farms without access to education and apply pesticides without adequate safety gear, conditions deemed abusive by the International Labor Organization. A staggering number, as many as 12,000 children, are likely to be forced laborers. Much of the impetus behind the use of child labor stems from insufficient income for cocoa producers. In 2002, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture found that cocoa revenues in West Africa average between $30 to $100 U.S. dollars per household member per year. To compensate, cocoa farmers seek out cheaper labor and resort to higher-yield sun-grown cocoa beans, which require significant deforestation. Because sun-grown beans are more susceptible to pests and diseases than those grown in shade, farmers use heavy doses of hazardous pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.

Yet "there is a solution," according to Adrienne Fitch-Frankel, Global Exchange's economic justice campaigner. "All you have to do is eat more chocolate." Fair-trade certification guarantees that growers are paid a higher-than-average price for their beans, at least $.80 per pound for cocoa and $.89 per pound when it's organic. Abusive child labor and forced labor of any kind are banned, and the most hazardous pesticides, including DDT, methyl parathion and lindane, are prohibited.

"Fair trade has helped us a lot," explains Cecilia Appianim, a cocoa farmer from the Kuapa Kokoo cocoa cooperative in Ghana. "Through this process we are able to care for our children. Before, children were walking [around idly] in the village. Now, children are in school, because now we have schools." Appianim says that fair trade has also empowered women in Ghana, "[Before], women were not taking part. Now women are able to take part." Women in Kuapa Kokoo participate in elections and hold elected positions, and Appianim is currently its financial secretary.

This Halloween, little ghouls and goblins in the U.S. can do their part by spending the night "reverse trick-or-treating" in partnership with Global Exchange. As kids go door-to-door, they'll switch roles and hand over fair-trade chocolate and literature to neighbors. Fitch-Frankel expects 40,000 households to learn about fair trade on Halloween night. For more information, see reversetrickortreating.org.