Child Labour and Chocolate Eggs

When I was a child, Easter Monday was always the day for taking stock of the eggs sitting on top of the piano. There would usually be quite a few and you could work out how many days' supply of chocolate treats lay ahead with careful management!

The egg signified new life, nourishment, hope, the opening up of possibilities as the egg-shaped stone was rolled away from Jesus' tomb. It also meant lots of fun with your friends as you shared the generosity of aunts and uncles, next-door neighbours and grandparents.

Not all children have the same innocent relationship of fun with the chocolate Easter egg. Stop the Traffic is an Australian coalition that campaigns to improve the wellbeing of farmers at the bottom of the food chain and thereby irradicate child labour and the trafficking of children. They focus mainly on the fashion, cotton, fishing, tea and chocolate industries.

In West Africa (mainly the Ivory Coast and Ghana) a proportion of cocoa is harvested by child labour, mainly young boys who are trafficked for the purpose. 90% of the world's cocoa is grown by small-holding farmers who cannot make a living wage from selling their product to the large production companies. Stop the Traffic states that 70% of the world's cocoa comes from West Africa where there are millions of children involved in its production. Farmers are locked into a cycle that does not permit them to lift themselves and their families out of poverty and results in the use of forced child labour.

In order to be certain that your Easter egg or other chocolate product has not been produced using child labour you need to look out for 'Fair Trade', 'Cocoa Life', 'Cocoa Plan', 'Rain Forest Alliance', 'Cocoa Farming Programme' or 'UTZ Certified Cocoa' labels.

Stop the Traffic commissioned a report into the activities of six major chocolate companies. A Matter of Taste is a unique and ground-breaking piece of work looking at the steps these companies are taking toward eliminating child labour and there is detailed information to be found there.

In Britain, many of us associate the production of chocolate with Quaker firms like Cadbury, Rowntree and Fry. Since the last third of the twentieth century these companies are no longer in Quaker hands and have been taken over by some of the multinational giants. But the charitable trusts set up in conjunction with these great Quaker companies remain and are now actively working toward sustainability of the environment and the irradication of poverty and slavery. More can be gleaned about the U.K. scene from Jon Martin's article on the Quaker website, A Quick History of Chocolate and Quakerism 

As you eat your Easter eggs, check for signs they haven't been produced using child labour and that they don't contain palm oil whose production contributes to deforestation. Jon Martin also makes the point that eating recreational food with ingredients transported across the globe is not the best way to use resources or celebrate life. So perhaps a look at how locally produced treats could be incorporated in your celebrations in future might provide for a more sustainable way of marking Easter next year?

Or here's an idea for Easter Story Eggs that might be fun (though not chocolatey!) Resurrection Eggs. You could make it with cardboard eggs and real leaves instead of plastic ones.

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