I recently watched a BBC documentary called "Chocolate: The Bitter Truth."  And, wow.  This is a hard-hitting documentary about the human cost of chocolate, 60% of which is grown in a narrow tropical belt in West Africa, both Ghana and the Ivory Coast.  This documentary isn't yet available in America, but you can read an excellent article which sums up the documentary's contents here on the BBC website.

It turns out that chocolate is about as bad as diamonds, ethically speaking.  There are international and national rules regarding child labor, which the cocoa growers flagrantly violate.  Children are pressed into service with dangerous tools, instead of being in school as the law demands.

Worse, children are sold into slavery to the cocoa farms.  Burkina Faso is the ridiculously poor country with the misfortune to lie adjacent to the Ivory Coast and Ghana.  Thousands of children from Burkina Faso are sold into slavery on the cocoa plantations.

Fair Trade certification is definitely a step in the right direction.  Although as the documentary shows, it is not a complete fix.  In some cases it seems that Fair Trade certification just means that the plantation owners get more money for doing the same evil deeds.

Fair Trade certification doesn't guarantee that your chocolate bar is free of human misery, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.  Reading between the lines, at least your Fair Trade chocolate is less likely to be produced with child slave labor.  Child labor, yes, but not the labor of children stolen from their families.

I was most irked to learn that two major manufacturers, Cadbury Milk bars and Nestle's Kit Kat, are now being sold as Fair Trade Certified in the UK.  Apparently this is a result of the greater public pressure and awareness of the ethical issues in the UK.  So far as I can tell, the Cadbury and Kit Kat bars in the United States are NOT Fair Trade Certified, nor do they have any plans to certify them.

There was a push in Congress in 2001 to start requiring that all chocolate products sold in the States be "slave free."  This initiative ended up in the hands of the candy manufacturers, and that's pretty much where it died.  One funny sequence in the documentary shows the filmmaker shopping around his own chocolate bar, which he made with beans he purchased in the filming.  His bars are labeled "Made with the worst forms of illegal child labor."  

It's less funny when he points out that every chocolate bar sold in the US is eligible for this label.

In the States, the best source for Fair Trade chocolate is the Divine line of products, which come from the Kuapo Kokoo chocolate cooperative in Ghana.  This cooperative has its share of problems, with several suppliers being suspended for violations, but it's a far sight better than nothing.

Endangered Species Chocolate is another ethical choice.  They offer a wide variety of chocolate bar types and sizes, and are committed to ethical trading as well as habitat and species conservation.

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user ChrissyGombos