My UU lay preaching gig starts up again next month (I went on leave the second half of last year), and the working title of my sermon is "Pink Ribbons and Chocolate." I'm planning to center it on trying to be a responsible consumer when it comes to food -- becoming aware of what exactly is being donated when you buy, say, specially-marked cans of soup or whatever, and about the connection between child slavery and chocolate.

I've only just started researching both issues, and the chocolate issue is definitely one where I'm going to feel like I'm preaching from a glass pulpit. (For instance, I just checked the chocolate bars I bought on impulse yesterday at the Turnip Truck. Made from West African beans. Erk. [ETA: ...except it's not that simple, because the company in question actually takes great pains to make sure they are engaging with suppliers who follow fair business practices, but they don't feel formal fair trade certification is for them (too restrictive and expensive, if I interpret their answer correctly).]

And has knowing it's human trafficking that makes M&Ms as cheap as they are stopped me from regularly scooping them up from a co-worker's candy dish? Well, sometimes it does (though, in the interests of full disclosure, the desire to shed last year's weight creep is an equal deterrent), but just as often it doesn't. I'm in no position to lecture nor confront other people about rewarding bad business practices with my pocket money, nor do I really wish to - I'm all too familiar with the compromises many of us make every day given the limits of time, income, and other resources, as well as the fact that it's not always clear if there are any good choices; I'm not going to support an independent retailer with bad customer service, sometimes convenience does end up mattering to me more than principle, and people's deal-breakers when it comes to effectiveness of tools/product vs. customer service vs. personal principles vary widely.

Fortunately, being perfect or consistent or definitive isn't my role as a preacher. My job is to make people aware of connections that they might not have been aware of before - not only the bad, but the good - so that they have the opportunity to make better-informed choices about how to conduct their lives and to help repair the world. It means talking about how slavery isn't a practice of the distant past, noting that other people are paying attention to such issues, pondering how best to take action, celebrating the efforts of the Archbishop of York and other religious leaders to raise awareness, and supporting chocolate manufacturers who do go to the trouble of purchasing their beans from fair trade or like-minded vendors (these include the Green and Black's, Paul Newman's, and Endangered Species brands, which I happen to know are available where I live).

Along those lines, some links:
Chocolate Company Scorecard (PDF) issued by the ILRF a year ago
Global Exchange curriculum/kits for grades K-6 (in all honesty, their self-marketing came across a shade aggressive to me, but YMMV)
Where to find "slave-free chocolate" (chart halfway down the page)
[ETA]: Better World Shopper report card (this is the most user-friendly chart I've seen yet)

A lot of the most-cited pages on this topic are fairly old, so one of my questions going in was, "Is this topic even still alive?" The short answer is "yes." In fact, the extended deadline for reform initiatives that major cocoa manufacturers had agreed to is July 1 of this year.

More links:
BBC report, 2 April 2007

Chocolate Manufacturers Association statement on the Harkin-Engel Protocol, July 2005. A congressional delegation traveled to Ghana and the Ivory Coast earlier this month; a study is cited at the end of the article that suggests "slavery" may not be the appropriate term if the majority of children are working for their own families.

World Cocoa Foundation. Includes a blog on educational efforts; focus is on how to encourage and support substainable farming.

Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet, a book by Carol Off, a CBC journalist. (Published by Random House Canada in 2006; to be published in the US this spring by The New Press.) An online review here.

One of the things that took a fair amount of surfing around to get a clearer picture on was what's been happening since three organizations (Global Exchange; Wiggins, Childs, Quinn & Pantazis (a law firm specializing in anti-discrimination work), and the International Labor Rights Forum filed suit against Nestle, Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland in July 2005. From a cached version of a dead page at ILRF, it appears Nestle filed an anti-anonymity motion in August ("to force child labor victims to reveal their names, thus making them face violent retaliation," according to ILRF). In 2006, ILRF filed a "Declaration in Opposition of Defendant's Motion to Dismiss" in January and "Corrections to original complaint" in August. Also in August, both Nestle and IRLF filed supplemental briefs in response to the court's questions. In October, the ILRF filed a new brief and reported that Nestle argues that its Codes of Conduct are merely "aspirational" and non-binding.

Wiggins, Childs, Quinn & Pantazis's media page about the case (includes a link to a 24-page PDF of the claim). I haven't found anything yet re: more hearings and/or a ruling.

Responsible Shopper provides a more comprehensive list of reasons one might not want to support Nestle; anti-Bush readers might wish to note that the company chairman was a major fundraiser for W's re-election campaign.

Reverse Trick-Or-Treating, 2007. Apparently the UUSC was involved with this.

Oh, here's a whole new chocolate-related kerfuffle I hadn't known about: As of August 2007, there was a controversy over chocolate labeling folks were waiting for the FDA to rule upon. I'll have to follow up on that one later, though -- I'm out of steam, so it's to bed for me.