Voting With Our Wallets

CNN ran this article this morning;

Child slavery and chocolate: All too easy to find

In “Chocolate’s Child Slaves,” CNN’s David McKenzie travels into the heart of the Ivory Coast to investigate children working in the cocoa fields. (Premieres Friday January 20, 8 p.m. GMT, 9 CET on CNN International.)

By David McKenzie and Brent Swails, CNN

Daloa, Ivory Coast (CNN) – Chocolate’s billion-dollar industry starts with workers like Abdul. He squats with a gang of a dozen harvesters on an Ivory Coast farm.

Abdul holds the yellow cocoa pod lengthwise and gives it two quick cracks, snapping it open to reveal milky white cocoa beans. He dumps the beans on a growing pile.

Abdul is 10 years old, a three-year veteran of the job.

He has never tasted chocolate.

During the course of an investigation for CNN’s Freedom Project initiative – an investigation that went deep into the cocoa fields of Ivory Coast – a team of CNN journalists found that child labor, trafficking and slavery are rife in an industry that produces some of the world’s best-known brands.

It was not supposed to be this way.

After a series of news reports surfaced in 2001 about gross violations in the cocoa industry, lawmakers in the United States put immense pressure on the industry to change.

“We felt like the public ought to know about it, and we ought to take some action to try to stop it,” said Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, who, together with Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, spearheaded the response. “How many people in America know that all this chocolate they are eating – candies and all of those wonderful chocolates – is being produced by terrible child labor?”

More about the Harkin-Engel Protocol

But after intense lobbying by the cocoa industry, lawmakers weren’t able to push through a law. What they got was a voluntary protocol, signed by the heads of the chocolate industry, to stop the worst forms of child labor “as a matter of urgency.” One of the key goals was to certify the cocoa trade as child-labor free.

“It was meant to achieve the end of child slave labor in cocoa fields,” Engel said.

It didn’t.

UNICEF estimates that nearly a half-million children work on farms across Ivory Coast, which produces nearly 40% of the world’s supply of cocoa. The agency says hundreds of thousands of children, many of them trafficked across borders, are engaged in the worst forms of child labor.

A recent study by Tulane University says the industry’s efforts to stop child labor are “uneven” and “incomplete” and that 97% of Ivory Coast’s farmers had not been reached. But the industry’s main representative in the country disagrees with the assessment.

“I think the situation has improved exponentially,” said Rabola Kagohi, country director for the International Cocoa Initiative, the chocolate industry’s answer to fighting child labor and trafficking. “Today, the message is physically getting through.”

Kagohi works out of a basement office with one other permanent employee.

“There are some results,” he said. “I wish that you had spoken to some planters.”

None of the farmers CNN spoke to in the heart of the cocoa production region said they had ever been reached by the International Cocoa Initiative, the government or chocolate companies about child trafficking.More……

How Can You Help?

Bu voting when you shop, with your choices.  There are two options that I found easy to use; And here are a few websites to check on the brand you are choosing while shopping;

GreenAmerica.org

FairTradeUSA

EthicalConsumer

Young, Obese and in Surgery

Millie; Her Physician, Dr. Vayner said, prophetically, “It’s not your fault, but you’re not going to be able to do it.”

WHAT?  Her doctor told her she would not be able to lose weight?  How about educating her as to what great nutrition is, how carbs are what makes her gain weight?  Or doesn’t this doctor (or other doctors) know how to educate their patients on nutrition? And if they don’t perhaps they should not be practicing medicine!  My mechanic knows what fuel is best for my car and how to keep my engine clean and a doctor doesn’t know such basic info?  I had a doctor tell me once he didn’t “have time” to educate his patients.  I had another tell me there was NO PROFIT in teaching them how to get well to a high degree because then her patients wouldn’t continue to come in that average 7 times a year!

In ancient China a physician was paid when his patients were well, when they got sick he didn’t get paid!

Here’s the article from NYTimes;

By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

Though Shani Gofman had been teased for being fat since the fourth grade, she had learned to deal with it.

She was a B student and in the drama club at school. She had good friends and a boyfriend she had met through Facebook. She even showed off her curves in spandex leggings and snug shirts.

When her pediatrician, Dr. Senya Vayner, first mentioned weight-loss surgery, Ms. Gofman was 17, still living with her parents in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, her bedroom decorated with glow-in-the-dark stars because she was afraid of the dark.

There was no question, at 5-foot-1 and more than 250 pounds, she was overweight. But she resisted, saying she could diet.

“I’ll lose weight,” Ms. Gofman assured her doctor.

Dr. Vayner said, prophetically, “It’s not your fault, but you’re not going to be able to do it.”

Along with the obesity epidemic in America has come an explosion in weight-loss surgery, with about 220,000 operations a year — a sevenfold leap in a decade, according to industry figures — costing more than $6 billion a year. And the newest frontier is young patients like Ms. Gofman, who allowed The New York Times to follow her for a year as she had the operation and then embarked on a quest to lose weight, navigating challenges to her morale, her self-image and her relationships with family members and friends.

To the article…