Hello World,
This is just an intro post to explain what this blog is going to be about and why.
Around a year and a half ago, I decided to investigate abusive labour practices in the cocoa industry. I'd watched a BBC documentary about child slave labour on cocoa plantations sometime in the 90s and I wanted to follow up on it. So I read a book called Bitter Chocolate by Canadian journalist Carol Off which looked at child slave labour on cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast where many chocolate companies source their cocoa from (more on this later). It also looked at places that have overcome this sort of thing by paying fair wages to farmers so they can in turn pay fair wages to workers. So I decided to only consume fair trade chocolate after that. Its been around a year since I started that and its been going really well. I discover more and more awesome fair trade chocolate products every day.
Then sometime in 2011, I read an article about slave labour used on tomato plantations in Florida. Florida! That woke me up a bit i.e. that this could happen so close to home. So this year, I decided that I wanted to look into more things I use regularly and find out where they come from. Each week in 2012, I will be looking at one product and trying to trace its origins and posting my findings.
Note that I am not a journalist, just a regular person trying to consume more ethically. So this blog will also be a way to see how much information can be found by a lay person doing a few hours of research into this topic. I realize that product supply chains can be pretty hard to trace so I'll start by focusing on simpler products whose origins might be easier to track.
Also, some words about the scope of this. There are a lot of things that bother me about products I consume including their impact on health, treatment of animals in case of animal products, etc. To keep from turning this into a full time job, I will limit myself to looking only at the human labour part of the equation for products.
Thanks for reading and be on the lookout for my first real post soon!
Z
