Chocolate Traffic

Fancy working 80-100 hours a week for little pay? If so the chocolate trade is for you. 600,000 – 800,000 people are trafficked every year, according to the UN. The Ivory Coast and Ghana produce up to 70% of the world’s cocoa and it is estimated that up to 90% of workers on cocoa plants in the Ivory Coast are either trafficked or forced into labour. In the whole of West Africa it is estimated that more than 284,000 children work in some of the worst conditions of child labour.

Last week was the beginning of Advent where we begin to remember the birth of Jesus and everything he stood for, and died for. The core messages of Jesus are clear to so many of us but when thinking about issues to do with justice and righteousness I find myself being drawn to what Jesus said as he began his ministry in Luke 4, when he quoted from Isaiah 61:

The Spirit of the sovereign Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.

Just as this marked out what Jesus' life would stand for, it should also speak to us, as his disciples, about what part we are playing in bringing these words to life. If we cast our minds back to a fantastic Easter event earlier on in the year we might remember some of the things we were taught and the horrific story of ‘Chaga and the Chocolate Factory’. It challenges us to do a little to bring about large scale change. One of the things I have been thinking about recently comes in asking the question, are we limited by our imaginations? Do we limit God because of how we limit our own capabilities? With issues of global injustice it can be very easy to adopt a mentality of simply seeing these things in their enormity. That there’s no change we can make which could bring about large scale change. However, I think there is a challenge not to reduce our effect by focusing on the enormity of the issue but to grapple with what it means to be faithful in the small while expecting God make the large scale changes that are necessary.

So what can we do? We can drive the demand for products that have been made using ethical means. Supporting ethical businesses and rejecting unethical businesses is a form of voting. You are saying NO to human trafficking and exploitation, and YES to good working conditions, fair prices, and equality. Trafficking reduces human beings to commodities. They become people bought and sold simply to service the ever-growing demands of global consumers for cheap goods and service. Let’s do our best to keep faces on figures and people in products.

Posted by: Chris Ford on Monday Dec 8th, 2008

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