Coffee and Chocolate: America's Two Addictions

My whole life I have loved chocolate.   As a teenage and young adult woman, I have made many light-hearted comments about how I need chocolate when I'm stressed or when I'm "PMS-ing."  And I've even joked that the best way to a woman's heart is through chocolate. 

And how many of us had woken up in the morning and let a roommate or significant other know to "not talk to us until we've had our coffee."  How many of us have used coffee shops as a place to hang out, or dropped $4 or $5 on a Starbucks drink?

On average, Americans spend $13 billion per year on chocolate and $18 billion on coffee.  With all of that money being spent, you would think that the farmers who grow cocoa and coffee beans would have a stable crop with which to make a living wage and support their families.  However this couldn't be further from reality.  The huge corporations that sell chocolate (Mars, Nestle, Hershey's) and coffee (Nestle, Kraft, Procter & Gamble, Sara Lee) are the ones who pad their pockets (and the pocket's of their investors) and the farmers that grow these crops are barely maintaining a life of poverty.

The U.S. State Department has investigated the labor practices on Cocoa farms in West Africa (where the majority of the world's cocoa beans come from) and found them to include child labor, human trafficking and forced labor.  The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture also found that an estimated 284,000 children are working on cocoa farms, and that these children were most likely kidnapped from their homes under false pretenses, smuggled across international borders, and forced to work as slaves on the cocoa farms (that produce your Crunch bar, M&M's and Reese's). 

If the U.S. State Department and a legitimate International Organization know about these atrocities, why has nothing been done?  Things have tried to be done, but the Chocolate companies have hired lobbyists and reached "compromises" where Hershey's, Mars and Nestle PROMISED they would do better to ensure ethical labor conditions on the farms where their beans are sourced.  However since the U.S. State Dept's first investigation in 2000, they had found no significant improvement in labor practices as of 2009.

How could these companies get away with this?? The answer is simple, Americans keep buying their products.


Before 1989, the International Coffee Agreement held the price of coffee steady.  Western Countries put this agreement into affect because they believed that if the coffee growers could earn a living wage and stayed out of poverty, they could avoid the economic instability that Communists might take advantage of.  Also around the late 80's and early 90's, Western consumers began their addiction the hot beverage.  About this time developing countries were encouraged to produce more coffee to respond to the increased demand.  However they produced too much.  Combine this surplus of supply with the U.S. abandoning the International Coffee Agreement at the end of the Cold War, and the price of coffee plummeted.  Families in Africa, Central and South America who had been coffee farmers for generations could no longer sell their coffee for a price greater than the amount of money they had invested into growing the crop.  However, with few other choices on where to sell their crop, they had to sell it at a loss to Western Corporations to at least salvage what little they could.  In essence, the West was stealing from them.  Not only stealing their crop, but stealing their livelihood and their dignity.


How could these companies get away with this??   The answer is simple, Americans keep buying their products.