Buying Organic Flowers, Coffee and Chocolate Makes a Difference

Fortunately, due to advocacy and increased consumer awareness, more people are asking for fair traded and organic products. In turn it has become easier to purchase fair trade organic chocolate, coffee, tea and flowers. The information below offers excellent reasons for consumers to ask for and purchase these fairly traded and organic products.

Did you know that when you purchase organic and Fair Trade chocolate, coffee and flowers your consumer dollars will no longer be going towards toxic pesticides, child slavery, and farm worker exploitation?

Over 40 percent of the world’s conventional chocolate (i.e. non-organic and non-Fair Trade) comes from Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), where the International Labor Organization (ILO) and U.S. State Department have reported widespread instances of child slavery. Exploitation of cacao farmers and farm workers is the global norm in the chocolate industry, rather than the exception.

Meanwhile, organizations such as the Pesticide Action Network point out that commercial flowers, produced in countries such as Colombia, are the most toxic and heavily sprayed agricultural crops on Earth. The high profits collected by transnational flower exporters are derived from poisoning the land and farmers, while forcing workers in the flower industry, often young women, to work 18 hour days for poverty wages during peak flower buying times such as Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.

About 95% of the world's coffee, tea and cocoa comes from third world countries. Coffee is the second most heavily traded commodity in the world next to oil. Yet thousands of farm families who raise these products don't even get 20 cents a pound for their goods. They often live in poverty and are prone to losing their land.

The following statistics come from the Organic Consumers Association:

FACT: One-third of Nestlé’s chocolate comes from West Africa, where over 286,000 children are working in slave-like conditions on cocoa (chocolate) farms.

FACT: Dole is the largest distributor of cut-flowers in the world, the majority of which are imported from Columbia and Ecuador, where farmers and flower workers (often adolescent girls) are exposed to 127 different chemicals, including neurotoxins and carcinogens.

FACT: The three private owners of M&M/Mars Inc. are each "worth" $10.4 billion, while the West African farmers growing the cocoa for M&Ms chocolate are paid an average of $108 annually.

FACT: Despite record profits in 2006, Hershey's has been accused of buying from contractors who utilize child labor and child slavery on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast.

TAKE ACTION: Send a message to the chocolate and flower giants urging them to stop child labor, illegal toxic chemical use, union busting, and demanding that they pay their farmers a living wage.

For more infomation:
http://www.organicconsumers.org/valentines/alert.htm

A thorn in those Valentine's Day flowers

A recent article published in The Boston Globe sheds light on how the flower industry needs to change, and how those changes can be driven by consumer demand:

By Alexandra Early | February 13, 2007

EVERY YEAR on Valentine's Day, millions of Americans head to their local florist or supermarket to buy flowers for a friend or family member. Most are mainly concerned about getting the flowers to the recipient on time. Yet few ever ask where the flowers come from or who helped grow and pick them.

I never thought much about the human beings behind the bouquets either -- until I traveled to Colombia last year and talked with a group of "floriculture" workers in a village near Bogotá. I learned that our domestic expressions of affection -- which reach their largest volume on Valentine's Day and Mothers' Day -- require painful, low-paid labor by a global workforce that's largely female.

America's main supplier is Colombia, the second-largest exporter of fresh-cut flowers next to the Netherlands. More than 100,000 workers help grow, sort, and package the nearly $1 billion worth of flowers produced there each year. Originally spurred by tariff incentives designed to induce farmers to switch from coca cultivation, the industry is now dominated by big local plantation owners and multi national corporations like Dole Food.

The Colombian flower workers I met received little love or appreciation from management -- on Valentine's Day or any other. During a visit by a delegation of American labor and student activists, members of a union called Sintrasplendor described the many occupational hazards they face.

Whether young or old, they complained about the lack of protective equipment and clothing, which leaves them exposed to pesticides in the fields and to the fungicides that flowers are dipped in prior to shipment. They say the chemicals cause widespread headaches, asthma, nausea, and impaired vision. The repetitive tasks and long hours in assembly-line jobs have also left many flower workers with painful carpal tunnel injuries.

Like Coca Cola and other foreign firms in Colombia, Dole has taken advantage of the country's weak labor laws and climate of repression. When workers at Dole-owned Splendor Flowers tried to organize two years ago to win better pay and conditions, management conducted an aggressive anti-union campaign. According to the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF), this "included bringing in a company-backed union, firing union leaders, challenging the union's legal registration with the Colombian government, and refusing to re instate fired union leaders despite court orders to do so."

Moreover, Dole recently announced the closing of its Splendor plantation, blaming the lay off of one-third of its Colombian workforce on lower-wage competition from Africa and Asia. Within a decade, most roses will be "Made in China" because that nation is gearing up to undercut exporters in Ecuador, Kenya, Malaysia, and Thailand, as well as Colombia. On China's new flower farms, workers are already clipping roses in giant greenhouses, taking them to huge sheds to remove the thorns, and then wrapping them in paper and plastic for shipment to Los Angeles or Moscow. Without any job rights or union protection, young women earning $25 per month face the same occupational safety and health problems as their South American counter parts. Human-rights and labor solidarity groups like Witness For Peace, Global Exchange, the Colombia Support Network, and US Labor Education Project in the Americas have all taken up the cause of the displaced Splendor workers.

None of these activists is trying to cast an unwanted pall over Valentine's Day. They just want more consumers to choose flowers that have been certified as "VeriFlora" products. VeriFlora growers don't use the pesticides that sicken flower workers and they agree to respect local labor rights and environmental regulations.

A few years ago, American jewelry buyers were still being offered the product of illegal trafficking in precious stones -- the "blood diamonds" mined by child laborers in strife-torn Africa. It took years of international campaigning before public awareness was raised and importation of this tainted merchandise was sharply curtailed. If the abundant thorns in the global flower trade begin to prick a few consumer consciences, "floriculture" abuses may someday be censured as well. If enough of us question and complain, more flower importers in this country will begin using suppliers certified as socially responsible and worker-friendly.