I want so badly to write eloquently about Carol Off's most recent book, Bitter Chocolate, but I just don't feel right doing it. Co-host of As It Happens on CBC Radio 1, she's one of the finest journalists in Canada today, and Bitter Chocolate is a surprisingly engrossing history of cocoa and the particular forms that exploitation in the cocoa trade have taken through the centuries. I haven't gotten a chance to finish it yet though - a friend borrowed it, and then a serious lack of free time intervened - so I've got the outrage from hearing her speak at the U of A last November, but not enough solid arguments or solutions to back it up. This has manifested itself in hilarious ways.

The other day, I was just getting off the phone with the second person who'd called in a matter of minutes when the doorbell rang. A sequence of events like this always seems like a coordinated effort to bewilder me, and I was appropriately confused to see a woman who looked extremely unfamiliar on the other side of the door when I opened it. She sort of half-smiled at me in a bewildered way, looking slightly passed my shoulder and said, 'How are you guys today?' I looked around, and sure enough, I was alone, so I said, 'I'm fine, thanks.' She didn't seem entirely satisfied with this answer, and before I'd taken a breath she asked, 'Wouldyouliketobuysomechocolate tosupport [organisation whose name fails me]?'

Personally, I've been struggling with this, but the pervasiveness of chocolate in our society does not give me great optimism for the impacts of an undirected personal boycott of it. There are places I just don't buy from because they make my neighbourhood smell like grease or I go crazy buying pants from them and can't stop thinking about how many little boys and girls went hungry because their 13-year old sister who stitched the logo on didn't make enough to buy food for everybody that week. But from what I know about the labyrinthine complexities of the international cocoa trade, deciding not to buy chocolate chips out of protest for the conditions under which the beans were grown will not only fail to provide any tangible benefits for the producers, it may end up drive down a few monolithic Swiss chocolate companies' profits just that tiiiiny bit that makes them decide to pay even less for the cocoa from the growers.

You see why I can't go shopping?

So as this poor woman is standing at my door (on an admittedly sunny, if brisk, morning) waiting to find out if she's going to make two bucks or if she should be moving onto the next house, these and several other, darker thoughts flip through my head, and I end up answering something along the lines of, 'Do you have any fair trade chocolate?' To which she replies, 'What's that?' and is summarily rewarded with a twenty-second briefing on international finance, commodity trading, and modern slavery.

She said, 'Oh. No, I don't have any of that.' And she left.

I'm telling you this to make sure you're not under any illusions that I would deign to even feign authority or unflappable certainty about the vast majority of issues. I rely heavily on tough journalists like Off and on impassioned speakers like Kevin Bales, who has been doing remarkable work with his organisation, Free the Slaves, to get some movement on this, to give me the greatest possible amount of information I can acquire about things like this, but I'm not going to lecture you about buying a Mars bar today. Quite honestly, I don't know enough about the way the industry works to say definitively one way or another whether your decision to buy or not buy Fry's Cocoa today will mean producers in Ivory Coast aren't enslaving the 12-year olds walking across the border from Mali and Burkina Faso to find work to make a profit when they sell the beans. I know the fair trade industry goes some way to addressing this.

But I believe strongly what Off said when she spoke in November. It's a wonderful luxury for us to be able to make a certain amount of political actions through what we buy, but we have much more power as citizens than as consumers.

Incidentally, when I related this story yesterday, it included the descriptors '24-ish' and 'shaped like a pear,' so I apologise if my description of the encounter seems sanitised, but I thought it better to avoid that whole conversation.

Labels: citizens, youth

Christopher,
This post spoke to me personally. I was thinking of you while thinking on the bus, and I wished you were there to discuss with. Where does it end really? You (this "you" isn't you as in christopher, it's "you" as a hypothetical ethical person) take the first step and become a vegitarian to oppose treatment of animals for slaughter and clear cutting, but while you're learning about vegitarianism you stumble upon information about fair trade goods such as chocolate and coffee, as well as the benifits of true organic produce and not buying fruit out of season. Of course then you see it as a sin to buy anything that isn't produced locally. You return home from the grocery store confused and depressed and guilty because somehow one of your groceries slipped past the nets and you've realized the somewhere in order for you to have this insignificant addition to your meal, there have been negative consequences to the earth or it's people. Futhermore, bypassing food for a moment and thinking on a grander scale, how do you keep revulsion at bay the more you think about the state of things? Every piece of clothing becomes questionable, driving anywhere makes you feel guilty as hell and forget about trying to be an ethical consumer. There's too much pressure to even attempt it. So instead of being an educated caring citizen, you give up and go to Mcdonalds. Obviously I'm exagerating but, on a smaller scale, I do suffocate with thoughts like these. I don't know if that was as clear as I wanted but maybe you get my point? It's like you buy one carton of free range eggs and the flood gates are open. Maybe I'm alone to struggle with this, (but I have a feeling I'm not), my question is where is the line between being an ignorant couch potato and being stuck naked in a corner raked with guilt and indecision?

Hey Jen,
I don't think it does end. Here I am on another continent myself, and conversations about what's fair and what's sustainable are on a completely different page. I listened to someone on a CBC podcast speaking with Carol Off just yesterday, and he was saying that what he loathed about the political left was its interpretation of wealth as a zero-sum game, that I must be poor for you to be rich or vice-versa, and so the wealth must be redistributed so everybody can have a fair share. I don't agree that there is a finite amount of wealth to go around in our world, but that doesn't make our civilization depend any less on the poverty of many to fuel the wealth of others. It's not an inevitable property of personal or societal relationships, in other words, but it's a fact of ours. Causing harm to someone or something along the way in any of our actions is probably unavoidable, but the way we live, it's necessary.

I guess... we start looking at things holistically? In the broadest sense possible, in the finest detail possible, and take into account the impact of our actions.In a seven generations, let's change the way the world runs kind of sense, I think the solutions must lie in closely examining our relationships to each other and to the rest of this grand community of life.

The simplest way seems to me to be to change the logic by which our world is run. Fundamentally, deeply, as irrevocably as possible, to make massive shifts in how our societies think. A monumental undertaking, but no means an impossible one.

That's my thinking at this moment, anyway!