Join us at the Global Exchange Fair Trade Store in San Francisco for a Dominican Republic Fair Cocoa Harvest Global Exchange Reality Tours Report Back by honored participants and Fair Harvesters Keri Ferencz & Hime Levine!

Date: Wednesday, July 28
Time: 5:30 – 7:30pm
Where: 4018 24th St, San Francisco CA 94114 (map)

As participants in this year’s Fair Cocoa Harvest Reality Tour, Keri and Hime traveled to the Dominican Republic where they worked along-side farmers of a Fair Trade cocoa cooperative (CONACADO) to harvest cocoa. Having shared in the daily lives of small-scale farming families, they can share with us their understanding of what Fair Trade means for producers.

Fair Harvest is not intended to be a tour or tourist visit, but rather to be a lived experience that will motivate the participants to be committed fair trade advocates when they return. Spend your vacation harvesting social justice while learning about the beautiful culture, biodiversity, sustainable development and history of the Dominican Republic!

Learn about the importance of Fair Trade in the cocoa industry and how certification and economic alternatives can dramatically improve the lives of producers.

Join us at the Global Exchange Fair Trade Store in San Francisco for a
Dominican Republic Fair Cocoa Harvest
Global Exchange Reality Tours Report Back
by honored participants and Fair Harvesters
Keri Ferencz & Hime Levine

Date: Wednesday, July 28
Time: 5:30 – 7:30pm
Where: 4018 24th St, San Francisco CA 94114 (map)

As participants in this year’s Fair Cocoa Harvest Reality Tour, Keri and Hime traveled to the Dominican Republic where they worked along-side farmers of a Fair Trade cocoa cooperative (CONACADO) to harvest cocoa. Having shared in the daily lives of small-scale farming families, they can share with us their understanding of what Fair Trade means for producers.

Fair Harvest is not intended to be a tour or tourist visit, but rather to be a lived experience that will motivate the participants to be committed fair trade advocates when they return. Spend your vacation harvesting social justice while learning about the beautiful culture, biodiversity, sustainable development and history of the Dominican Republic!

Learn about the importance of Fair Trade in the cocoa industry and how certification and economic alternatives can dramatically improve the lives of producers.

Visit our cocoa homepage to find out how you can help end child slavery in the cocoa fields.

The BBC’s 2010 Panorama documentary, Chocolate — The Bitter Truth, contains stunning and disturbing evidence that the worst forms of child labor are still widespread in Ghana and Ivory Coast. Most chilling is the pervasiveness of children who are missing from their homes in Burkina Faso, because they have been trafficked into the cocoa fields.

The film also documents the success of the Fair Trade system in identifying and resolving cases of abusive child labor in the cocoa industry.

In the sourcing of cocoa, there are several basic characteristics that all must be fulfilled in order to eliminate abusive child labor from the cocoa supply chain. Some of the foremost examples are:

  1. Paying farmers a high enough price for their cocoa that (a) the price covers that full costs of production (including adult hired labor) and (b) farmers can afford their families’ basic human needs, including food, shelter, health care, and education for their children
  2. An inspection and enforcement system that identifies and remedies cases of illegal child labor, including (1) assistance to affected children, such as the provision of educational opportunities for children who have been working and family reunification for trafficked children, and (2) consequences for farmers using child labor
  3. Traceability of cocoa to the farm level, so that farmers who use child labor, and the chocolate companies that source their cocoa from child labor farms, can be identified and held accountable

Systems to address abusive child labor will fail without all three of these characteristics.

Global Exchange sees the Fair Trade system as the best answer to abusive child labor because its certification infrastructure includes all three of these characteristics, unlike other institutions in the cocoa trade.

The video can be viewed here.


O.k. so this is big news, folks. Possibly one of the biggest Fair Trade news developments in years!
Basically, an Interpol-led operation conducted by the Cote d’Ivoire police resulted in the rescue of more than 50 children and the arrest of at least eight individuals for the illegal recruitment of children.

What does this have to do with Fair Trade? The children had been bought by cocoa (and palm) plantation owners looking for cheap (and illegal) labor to harvest the cocoa. As our friends at ILRF point out: The US Department of State estimates that more than 109,000 children in Cote d’Ivoire’s cocoa industry work under “the worst forms of child labor,” and that some 10,000 are victims of human trafficking or enslavement.

This operation codenamed “BIA” (after the river separating Ghana from Cote d’Ivoire) clearly demonstrates the existence of child trafficking and forced labor within the region. Hopefully this rescue is the first of many more actions to come, and will demonstrate that illegally hiring and forcing children to do the cocoa industry’s dirty work will not be tolerated.