morning welcome to changes the program on sustainability we have been off the air for quite some time and so for listeners who haven't heard us before we bring you shows on changes that we would like to see in the world in terms of environmental sustainability and social justice we have four hosts who take turns doing shows on different aspects of the issues i am suzanne gregory the coordinating producer of the show and i'll just mention that changes began on c h l y in november of two thousand and one so we were on for almost twelve years but we've been on hiatus since the end of august two thousand and three and here we are back again thanks to some great new management at c h l why and the team that produces our show has some new members to introduce to you as well over the next few weeks but this one and you were interviewed you're going to be the host day because you have been doing the food security stream on the show as board chair of the i'm a food share i think today maybe we're going a little bit into global village and i'm going to where two of my passions connect yanis i'm a fair trade and the other one is food security and they are flip sides of each other yes yes indeed hiatus and purely serendipitously we have the people who were here the very first time we went on air so welcome to len white unbroke college vancouver island university professor farmer activist what else slim and something of a self made expert on the chocolate slavery issue to lead and i are the two who i think are the most some of them would probably have a better understanding of the economic forces that drive this issue whereas people who have grown up here in the north american culture don't really get much opportunity to figure out what's going on in the rest of the world that's right my big example here my big point of view at the moment is that the chocolate issue boils down to a very familiar one and one that local people will be aware of it's elimination from the source it's not knowing enough to care about the person who produced the stuff who doesn't  festivals to get co opted valentine's day has been turned into an attempt to connect relationships with self indulgence and i have nothing against self indulgence said in moderation but i do think we need to look at the long term history of chocolate and recognize that it's one of the great mysteries nobody can tell you  into search and can you tell me definitively where the cowboys started no i mean central america is what we know oh we know is that they were using it in middle america three thousand years ago may i just but here and here for a second listen i do not hearing your microphone very well i don't know what this sounds like to our listeners out there but i'm just is a recognized component of stuff that could be called pharmaceutical and has fair some comparisons with e hundred tamales with one cocoa bean very very long ago or wow so it's been around a long time and just what brought the whole topic of slavery and cocoa to your attention and me ah it was in two thousand and there was an article in of all things the national post it was a two page spread  on a ship that had gone missing in f off the coast of africa and it was being tracked by u n ships because it was believed to be carrying child slaves the one with the two little children who were discovered nowhere when they eventually caught up with the ship and it stayed out to sea a long time was nobody on board and it's believed that everybody was all the slaves were thrown overboard so that they would not be caught but then the whole thing around cocoa slavery was also in their article and why there was a transportation of slaves up and down the coast of africa and it was just this huge explosive issue i was living in  at the time and it was it was one of those oh my gosh how do you how did we get here and that's when i began the research in the following year when i moved back you and i started to talk about this and work on this issue  look for fair trade chocolate yes because that was two thousand and one and and in that in those days there was nothing that was a really really bad hot chocolate came out of oxfam i think it's really  a point no no we didn't anyway they dropped and they had put all of their savings and large loans from their families into a little worker co op in ottawa and they controlled it was very interesting the co op development always one of the first investors we actually pulled our money out of it about three years ago when we suddenly dawned on us that they were very well but that's that's a fair trade chocolate of good quality and code that you will see in grocery stores now so there is no excuse to avoid the cocoa powder for your brown ears or to avoid the chocolate and it would chocolate in fact i think that the only ones available here that  habitat and the environment and the questions of terror why are which are starting to emerge about chalk it is not funny but if you look on a globe and it has to be a globe because you need to go around and if you remember that the cocoa tree will only flourish in under a jungle canopy within ten degrees either side of the equator and if you start mexico which is the sort of closest to the pacific and then you bump across that star produced in vast quantities and purcell that takes you to the atlantic and then suddenly it heaves across the atlantic to europe and to west africa and in west africa they found the potential to produce cocoa so cheaply it's disgusting and the reason for the cheap this is the slavery but that doesn't alter the fact that it kept on going round and it comes all the way around until you get back to fiji and samoa and it's just a hop over to mexico but i'd learned that the biggest producers in the world i checked i checked the biggest producers in the world are still the ivory coast the west african impoverished country still about forty percent is not close to forty percent ghana comes next with twenty plus percent and moving up very fast with the help of  indonesia are with really nearly thirteen percent of the world market wow so that's those are the places everywhere around that belt ten degrees either sound either side of the equator corporations entrepreneurs companies have moved in and encourage the growth of the cocoa but still the big issue is the stream of cocoa beans going into the bull market from west africa particularly ivory coast because that's where the slavery issue that you mentioned and perhaps you could take a moment to describe the kind of slavery that you read about because it is truly horrifying the new slavery you know new slavery is very different from the old slavery because one of the reasons it can't be reformed two and a half centuries or so ago the company was because there was slavery on founded company so it's very interesting that cadbury well i don't know now that kraft has taken over and you might be able to help with that but up until kraft the hostile takeover of kraft they were buying exclusively from ghana where there is no slavery occasionally bought from from different parts of africa but particularly bikini so and some of the really impoverished countries right around the ivory coast but as as we could tell from that ship going up the coast from other places as well quite often they're bribed with promises of of seasonal income which is what the until the bottom fell out of the cocoa market and the farmers turned to slavery in the late ninety's it was seasonal work and it was paid and then people could take that home to their family and it was also nobody's saying it's not ok for children to work in the where it's within reason and if it's paid work so and we know now that these children they're smuggled into from hundreds of miles away from where they're from they don't know where they are so scape is not really an issue because they have no idea where they are so they don't know how to get out ambassadors from local cut local surrounding countries working on this and of course as other groups been working on it and he slavery u k which is an credibly active anti slavery group because there's far more slavery the most people have any idea of they reckon over thirty million men women and children and slaves right now and we're talking real slavery we're not talking switch up that's a another discussion altogether we're talking and paid not allowed to leave people want to talk about chocolate when you think about these boys and you think about how at some point they must become useless you wonder what happens to them you wonder where they end up you wonder if it's going to sound a bit like some of the residential school issues that we've heard about here in canada and the youngster as who scrapes who is synonymous graves or are being discovered but when you start to find out the story that king leopold the two did everything he could to deep six then you start to wonder about the conscience of the where old because it turns out that under his revolting ownership he treated the congo as a personal fiefdom it was not considered to be part of belgium it was king leopold's place it's also considered that henry martin san stanley the dr livingston i presume explorer was his hit man stanley wasn't that he was not a not uncommon to see photographs of people with only one hand because if they annoyed or didn't produce their quota of one hand it would be looked locked off a lot of this was robbery but a great deal of it was was was cocoa so bear with me it ended up with ten million dead it's considered that that was a the lens through which joseph conrad produced his famous novella and when when it's discovered and when the people bonfires in the backyard of his estate getting rid of any incriminating documentation of his behavior in the holocaust of ten million people is not something to be ignored and the preeminence the belgian chocolate received over time after the swiss and the british and the americans perfected the technique of proof producing chocolate was based on the e c supply of cheap chocolate from laborers in the congo and we never knew that was going on did we know just discovered that that's very interesting isn't that a sho yeah we'll just take a quick pas while we catch our breath over that information and i think that's stunning hugh no yeah it does it just you start breathing information we just don't hear so thank you marjorie we're just going to take a quick break to remind you that you're listening to c h l y one zero one point seven f m your campus and community station based still ongoing in the basement of the queens hotel in lois lane in downtown the ny mo but heard of course wherever there's an internet connection at sea dot ca where we stream live and podcast and we're just going to mention a few events that are coming up there's a new group called opera non i who are bringing recital actually called opera valentine on thursday february thirteenth which is a great idea because the fourteenth gets kind of booked up so this is of the thirteenth seven thirty pm at st andrews presbyterian church the one on to parcher bay road behind country club mall tickets are twenty five dollars c event brite dot ca that's events b r i t e dot ca for more information one of the singers who will be performing actually one of the at least the district if not the regional metropolitan opera national council additions year or two ago so that there are a couple of other singers coming up from victorio perform with a small opera company there there's also going to be a benefit concert and silent auction for sea turtle conservation projects on feb fifteenth at four o'clock at church forty nine sixty hammond bay road in the ny mo tickets are available at our beautiful music on metro drive eighty percent of the proceeds from ticket sales will go to the hawaii wildlife fun to support their sea turtle conservation projects and you can get more information on that at hunter who events dot com and that h a n a o u events all together dot com and finally we'd like to talk a little bit about the inn and i am a global film festival that is coming up this weekend friday evening the fourteenth and all day and evening saturday the fifteenth three of us have been on the committee that puts this festival together so it's dear to all of our hearts there's nothing i don't think about chocolate this particular festival but there was the last time there was a film called nothing like chocolate which was about the grenada chocolate company which we may well there's a little consumerism yes yes absolutely if i and many many other things there are many social justice issues environmental issues and some food issues ads of food issues yes farming comes up one film is on a topic dear to lynn's heart and that is restoring desert to productive green states through perma culture and without expensive chemicals exactly right and it really greening the desert that one will be on at the painted turtle guest house one twenty one bastion street at two o'clock on saturday the fifteenth actually all of these films will be shown downtown this time most of well many of them will be at the kismet theater academy one twelve fifty five victoria road just a little bit beyond that imo center stage i think it's in the next building the films will be on there friday evening all day saturday and saturday evening then during the day on saturday films will also be screened at the ny mo museum which of course is in the new conference center on commercial street and at the painted turtle guest house and so you get a choice of three during the day but then all of the evening programs will be at kismet theater academy some really interesting ones there's there's one called last chance which is about people escaping homophobia in other countries coming to canada but facing uncertainty about their immigration status and just what's going to happen to them in the future solar mamma says an interesting one about women in a number of countries bedouin women in particular in jordan i think it was featured in th rowley who is an outstanding citizen the activist philanthropist who brought together these people and figured out that the most useful thing to do would be to bring some political power solar power and that could be done by teaching people whose language you don't even speak now and many of these women are illiterate and yet they learn the terminology and they they learn how to do the whole process and it's making huge changes in their communities although some of them are facing some challenges well the cultural stuff is for israeli if it really funny  indeed so check that one out that is at four forty five on saturday afternoon at kismet theater academy that's related to the show that we're doing today on changes it's called after the harvest fighting hunger in the coffee lands so this is about coffee growers who are not paid enough to actually live to actually are all there is so that comes back to the fundamental point   nation and culpable ignorance about the share in the price of the commodity that goes to the person who does the hard graft at the beginning yes yes indeed so many many more there are some first nations related films project heart honoring residential school survivors will be on at eleven thirty saturday at kismet actually the one i just mentioned after the harvest be one o'clock saturday at nine am a museum so you can see all of the schedule here at the film fest dot org advance passes are available at the green store at fan i'll video you can get them online and of course they will be available at the door at all three venues right before any of the screenings  there are twenty six films in all i believe so there's quite a range that is banned many many social justice and and environmental issues oh there's another one that that i'd love the museum on saturday bear witness is about stopping the trophy hunt in the great bear rain forest i believe nine first nations have got together to make that happen so that looks like a very good film the one that's on right before and hawaii a message in the waves is about plastic garbage washing up on beautiful otherwise pristine beaches i've seen that on flores island actually know here in b c there you are in what seems like an absolutely whatever on flores island i don't know what's going on with logging there at the moment but when i was there it was out and then imo film fest dot org once again this friday february fourteenth in the evening ass starting at six at kismet theater academy at fifty five victoria road and all day saturday and at well and there are film descriptions as well as these schedules so you can actually find out there are not only descriptions of the films but trailers if you go to two thousand and fourteen films you'll see all of the films there with trailers as well as a description of what they're each about well i'm glad there's a list because a person that you can't makes it still to what chal the trailers so you can have a look at the hiatus and as i may have died grassed from a little bit at the beginning of the show i think the three of us were on for the very last show that we did before we went away as well as the very first show that we  thank you by the way to democracy north for filling in while we were gone i think that was a very worthy show and i hope our listeners can hear that as well on the line or perhaps it will turn up again on c h ally in another time slot but we shall see marjorie stewart is talking today with lyn white and brock about well slavery cocoa slavery where this all came from where it's all going how what we can do about it and how we're calling it from montezuma to mars bars well i doubt if we'll have time to go into the various innovations that different different famous  names were connected with in bringing the different kinds of chocolate to us and i'm thinking that perhaps the most useful thing we could talk about right now is the but passing goes on because what i'd like to do is sort of refer to each level and and see if i can get to comment on that because if you start with the slavers some of the slavers actually are in cahoots with the children's parents it's that devastatingly awful the grinding poverty and the surrounding countries there so why did the slavery sly lin why did they lie and say oh no this isn't slavery we're taking them to meaningful employment and well i think i don't know slavery has a bad connotation anywhere and of course we we here in the feeling comfortable with are under the assumption that slavery died up in the late eighteenth century i think  well they were mostly slaves but then weren't they because least one thing you can say about brazil is how thoroughly they intimidated with their black population right that's right so yeah we have this perception that slavery doesn't exist and i don't know how many times you and i have given talks and whatnot on this matter and people's eyes just about pop out of their heads will we talk about and then they place over a yes but then we talk about months later well let's move up the chain a they have nothing to do with regulating this the small farmers can't get enough money cetera et cetera et cetera and slavers the foreigners obviously and isn't that convenient it's very convenient what do you think that the government of a fast buck you know foster who was really really working hard on this issue and getting kids out and and they started to work with him but that government was overthrown during during the civil unrest a few years back and i think that they just pulled back at all well what can we do and of course there's so much they could do because they were doing it and it's illegal but they were actually searching the country for these children i think i believe what unpopular with their own families during the reason why the farmers in the ivory coast went from seasonal paid workers to slave labor was because they weren't paid enough for the cocoa beans to actually make a living at it anymore because the bottom and fallen out of the computer thinking he's made a few dollars who may have destroyed livelihoods far away yet and he doesn't want to think about that he only wants to think about money so i'm glad you took the natural segue to the plight of the farmers because when when economists whoever they were for in the hard currency nations talk about this ancient theory of comparative advantage you should grow what you're good at produce what you're good at and you'll make enough money money money and exchange for it that you'll do very well at your end but then people tinker with the global economy because as everybody knows the global economy is a mess it's an absolute mess and it's quite easy for scroungers to navigate around about it because they don't have many scruples so here we have the farmers at the mercy of of  global economic forces they've been dragged into the global economy they don't have any power atoll and the people who get the cheap goods from them i mean while preaching to them about growing this stuff because that's the way they'll get rich and it's bullshit like a do it they are told you must produce x and you've got to take all your subsidies away from the farmers so not only does the bottom of the market for fall out because of the price has gone down so much but the subsidies are removed at the same time because the ivory coast government has no choice that is the directive given them from the i m f if they want their their debts to be sort of carried over and so you've got this morass of the fact that these families are starving because because all of this is been done without so much as as a by your leave and the ivory coast government itself doesn't have a whole lot of of say which is why when all this came belgium right and to some degree other places but most most of north american chocolate comes from belgium originally and then it's it's further diluted or whatever here so yeah some so all these  put together with the cocoa beans from ghana and the cocoa beans from where everywhere else in africa grow they will go off to belgium and at the point where all this blew up the ivory coast was producing over forty percent of the world's it was forty two percent of the world's cocoa beans so it was impossible to eat and nestle buy anything of those companies that didn't have some slavery in it you had to either do cadbury's pre pre crash take over which we knew was coming from ghana or you had to do a fair trade you could do organic chocolate because there was no getting chocolate at that time being grown in the ivory coast but i do believe that's changed and and you know you could buy one that said you know from barbados or wherever because a quite a bit of coca grown in the west indies through now and so you know if it's it was sensual american or or whatever then then you were safe but so there's all this pressure coming out of the chocolatey is to stop buying beans from the ivory coast and most of them have ignored that pressure completely some have and it is changing lint lindt chocolate has just come on board and said that they will no longer buy any cocoa for the processes that have even the danger that there has been slavery  d and who would have thought twenty years ago that bunch of idealistic activists could get the attention of one of the major chocolate corporations of the world and lent we must point out it's the only one i think that isn't controlled by their craft honestly is their right to know that and still based in switzerland yeah but it is interesting and something i'd like to come back to that all of the processing is done in developed countries none of the processing of the commodity same with coffee very little of the processing is done where it's grown so that the hard graft and little pay gets dumped on the poorest countries and the goodies come to well let's bring it all the way up to the conseil bit because after the corporations get their hands on and i think  are not nestle and we are this point we're pretty sure that they've got the slavery bins in amongst the chocolate where eating yeah so let's just take a minute to think about the conflict that there has been amongst the large companies because i was particularly fascinated by the story of the great quaker candy make errors in england partly because i met one of them when i was a girl and we had long conversations and he was a very very interesting name man his name was seebohm roundtree ha ha and he came from the city of york so those quaker candy makers they didn't want to be involved in anything unethical and i thought well candy isn't identical they didn't know anything about junk food in those days and people didn't eat it to the extent they do and anyway so fry terry roundtree all of these people got into the business and i want to put in a plug for milton snavely hershey because her she was a good guy he had a hard time in his life he was a confectioner through and through he started a business and it failed he started another business and it failed his family kind of supported him and helped him every time and finally he made it through but they are revealing thing about is he and his wife couldn't have children and they love children and he had had a hard time growing up his family moved so often he never got a decent education so he poured all of his profits from the hershey chocolate empire into the milk slave labor slavery if milton harish her she school foundation and he was particularly interested in education for young boys first so her she had it right and he didn't come from any kind of privileged about ground he just had good ethical standards on the marcellus i think were not so interested in ethics they figured out the cheapest way to make chocolate was to put this little chocolate as possible on it and have other stuff in the middle clothing and yeah and when you think about it you can see how that must've really really made them competitive in the market and distill and twist the one who figured provide a substitute for mothers whose breast milk was not sufficient for their baby that was what he wanted to do right but shortly after he got out of the business or died the around the world they worked with and she made up her mind to buy buy canned brace so she managed to pull the money together and because cadbury's was publicly traded as soon as your business is publicly traded as the from it so where right back to square when we have large corporations controlling the chocolate business who don't care where their role materials come from the land we have we have small or small or attempts at providing us with chocolate because why should we be put in the position of having our ethics challenge to by producers of one of the major commodities in the world now much or do you know if croft is well cadbury's undercroft is still buy most of it all of the chocolate from ghana because they were the backbone of the of the gun and gun a strong and co ops they learned how to to make co ops in the farmers were better off and i got a better start into independence than some of the african countries it was early in and well well supported the truth is that kraft has divested self of that and of the business the c e o s plans didn't work out as the world and delay as i suppose as to refer to the just us and so all all the all the old ties are sort of broken down and rearranged so we have to do that that research again but do either of you remember the movie about bitter chocolate where the guy actually goes to west africa visits the farms sees the slavery beans which he knows perfectly well are made with slave labor and brings them back to the states gets in touch with a sick shock a friend and they produce this extremely elegant packaged chocolate bar and where the little local that might have said fair trade should go they put on it guaranteed made with slave labor and then in the movie it shows  because the guy's a filmmaker he really knows how to get a story across it shows him out on the streets of new york stopping people asking them who do you buy this chocolate and pointing to the little bit in the corner and he starts off we only see two interviews he starts off with two starry eyed young women oh no of course not of course not that's terrible i definitely wouldn't but then unfortunately the next one is and he stops it there so that we'll think is a lady of a certain age the street in new york and she said well of course i couldn't buy that it says slave labor and then he says to her what about all the other chocolate well that doesn't matter because i don't know me that that's one excuse that the big companies use as well isn't it as you mentioned earlier leon the beans from the ivory coast get mixed in with beans from other sources so the company can't plead ignorance as to whether or not there is slavery charcoal it in what they are buying or if so what is the percentage is it's an easy out because i mean when even if if ivory coast is down to say thirty nine percent of the world's chocolate cocoa there's still a a huge likelihood that there is slavery in the that you and if not this certainly will be in some of the chocolate and any amount of slavery should be appalling to us it should be well there's only a little bit of slavery so i'm ok with there i find this attitude amazing i was a little bit of rape yeah exactly yes and she was only slightly raped but i talked to a bakery here in ny mo asked them if they had chocolate baked goods were we're made with slave chocolate and the woman just looked at me it was quite clear she knew what a story meant she said well of course because that's all we can afford it always comes down to money doesn't it it's very interesting how things come down to money when my three children were in their teens one off to the out there they had a job in the muffin shop in wood grove mall and over time it became clear to me that the owner was a very nice person did did his level best to be fair to everybody but several things came became clear to me the overheads were very high because mol mol rental costs are very high so he had to charge to cover that but finally asking myself the question these things are being sold at a price which is less than enough to give the people who work there a living while my teenage kids didn't need a living wage but still and all that's not the way to deal with it because more and more we see that second incomes for working poor families are coming from jobs like that and that's right back to the unethical consumer and i'm sick of the unethical consumer including myself including myself because there's no way we can get away from it is there no try and by trying to buy an appliance that isn't made in the sw up in china yeah you know i had a friend decide that my wardrobe was appalling and took me on a on a clothing shop crawl this was one of my worst nightmares but i drove her crazy because  anything that was which shop made and you know it was so hard to find things that were not switch up made and then then we had to find out if they fit and if i like them and all that kind of or if i look good in them according to because she was the judge make and rents around fairness if they can make a back i would like to pay attention to some of the good stuff that is out there and i particularly want to give the nod to  with a k where you would expect to see for it from chocolate because it appears that veda who lives in this community and sells at farmers markets and and has a website that says something like w control of the company and i think that's rather neat and i also think it's neat since we mentioned cocoa camino and people should know enough to look out for their stuff i also think it's really neat that sounded a bit of research and came up with the granada chocolate is the grenada chocolate company well grenada grenada you know but it's the small island in the west indies that was the subject of the film called nothing like chocolate  screened at the last and i am a global film festival about an american guy named mark green who went to grenada and found that there were cocoa growers the vero and of course this  closer to where cocoa originated they were selling to some large conglomerate of some junk or and not doing very well and he thought and of course it typically cocoa producers never get to taste chocolate and it's not processed there it's shipped off somewhere else to belgium or more switzerland where  so he said we're going to do it all here we've it so he formed a co operative for the growers he buys a fair price from the growers and then they actually make the chocolate right there and it's called the grenada chocolate company it has a website you can look at up they have a beautiful colorful label on the bars and one thing that is extra google greneda chocolate company there are you there is a list of places where you can get it and there's a there are ways to contact them as well unfortunately my green himself passed away not too too long ago from electrocution while repairing some of the equipment he just did he was hands on he did everything himself but fortunately he also had local people who knew every aspect of the business so that and that's a great thing about the co author all right yes yes exactly and it's only three days to valentine's day i'm hoping if you've already purchase unknown anonymous chocolate you'll feel a little bit guilty that day and be thinking of ways to try and avoid them and i'm hoping that we'll find ways to support people like locally who is producing good quality chocolate there are people out there who are trying trying to do things with appropriate technology not the vast industrial conglomerate stuff that the huge corporations used and not very long ago there was a young woman from originally from colombia she lives on cape ala and she's a trained engineer i don't know quite what she was working at but she was really close to tracking down the right machinery to make chocolate with and get it into colombia so the processing could be done where the check but then she got a full time job and her project fell through so projects need support yes i think there are some good things going on in venezuela as well with regard to that we are just about out of time so is there one l thought that you would like to leave our listeners with well i didn't courage people to to buy ethical chocolate i think that's really important also a quick warning be very careful of buying green and black's chocolate green and blacks who had taken over by still on the world stage a small company and encouraged people like purdy's and kalibo that are so popular put pressure on them to become non slave and they they don't like to have let is saying i'm not buying a the great swiss chocolate they always got it right from the very beginning from rodolfo who found out how to conquer the chocolate and on that note we'll say thank you so much margery stewart and lyn white and brock for a fascinating program today and that is our show changes is heard and will continue now to be heard every tuesday morning at eleven here on c h l why do check us out on face on behalf of our production team thank you so much for joining us