Kraft, Mars, Nestle, Hershey - think before you buy that Valentine

The folks at GreenAmerica.org are determined to to promote green and Fair Trade business practices and end corporate abuse -- to make you aware before you buy chocolate and without realizing you might be supporting a company that exploits children, for instance.
♥ You can visit their website, or check out the chart (below) to compare the performance of brands you may or may not know. Of course, as chocolate buying peaks over the next few days...

"More than 35 million heart-shaped boxes of chocolate will be sold on February 14th, adding to the total 58 million pounds of chocolate to will be sold during the week of the most romantic holiday of the year.

Consumers are expected to purchase more than $345 million on chocolate treats for their beloveds."

Brigid Darragh
Green Chip Stocks
Friday, 11 Feb 2011

...it helps to understand just what the different certifications mean, and to do more than merely making deliberate choices. You can also spread the word, and communicate directly with companies such as Hershey to let them know you consider their business practices before you make your purchases.

"...every time a consumer purchases non-Fair Trade chocolate, they are putting money in the pockets of people who run a system based largely on forced child labor.

The U.S. State Department estimates more than 15,000 child slaves work on plantations in the Ivory Coast. Children are taken from their homes by traffickers for the very purpose of supporting the country's largest export crop: cocoa."

Brigid Darragh
Green Chip Stocks
Friday, 11 Feb 2011

Here are some basic definitions, courtesy of GreenAmerica.org:

Organic certification does not include labor rights standards. The program does not address wages, prices to producers, or management of cooperatives. Organic means 100% of the ingredients of a product be certified organic to earn the label.

Fair Trade prohibits forced labor, child labor, and discrimination, and protects freedom of association and collective bargaining rights. Fair Trade certified farmers are guaranteed a "floor price" for their cocoa beans, as well as a social premium. Fair Trade producers are required to form democratic cooperatives.

The IMO Fair for Life certification guarantees that human rights are protected at all stages of production, with a strong focus on hired laborers, as they are often the most marginalized in the supply chain. Fair for Life guarantees that smallholder farmers receive fair payment and that workers enjoy good and fair working conditions. The Fair for Life system prevents forced and child labor and also includes detailed environmental criteria. Fair For Life certified products must use Fair Trade ingredients if available, and regardless, 50% of all ingredients must be Fair Trade in order for a product to bear the seal.

The Rainforest Alliance (RA) standards prohibit the use of forced labor, child labor, and discrimination. The right to organize on RA-certified farms is not a critical criteria. RA does not require buyers to pay a specific minimum floor price for cocoa beans. Only 30% of the primary ingredient needs to be certified in order to earn an RA label.

And what about Nestle's UTZ Certification? UTZ was founded by Guatemalan coffee producers and the Ahold Coffee Company in 1997 and launched a cocoa plan 10 years later; it prohibits forced labor, however no organizations with a specific expertise in labor rights are included on the Board of Directors. So, while it protects the right to organize and bargain collectively, the price is solely based on negotiations between the buyers and farmers. Paying the legal minimum wage is required only after the first year of certification.

Now, what label is on your chocolate? ♥

Thomas Hayes is an entrepreneur, former Democratic Campaign Manager, strategist, journalist, and photographer who contributes regularly to a host of web sites on topics ranging from economics and politics to culture and community.
You can follow him as @kabiu on twitter.

Tom Hayes: The profit motive is great, but...

There was a time when the concept of community was strictly geographic - in practical terms, what happened to people who directly affected your chance of survival was what mattered. Money and technology have profound ramifications for how we see communities and how they function.

We're all utterly interconnected.

Here's an overview, with excerpts, of the recent article, "Communities of Interest" describing the debate over health care insurance reform from a moral and community perspective at the Actualizers blogsite:

In the richest, most technologically advanced nation in the world, the United States of America, we are debating the merit of extending health care coverage to tens of millions of our closest friends and neighbors by making it affordable. Tens of millions of American citizens have no health care insurance.

Yet, rather than examine the successes in other countries and adopting their best practices, big business interests in this debate are spending millions of dollars every day (collected from health care premiums) to influence the men and women in Congress, who are sorely outnumbered by the lobbyists. It's a travesty - a sham - that makes a mockery of the alleged reliance on free markets to insure efficiency and improvement of goods and services.

One way or another, we pay.  One way, with only some of us insured, we not only pay for the costs of treating the uninsured, including potentially their bankruptcies, we also pay 8-digit salaries and bonuses to CEOs and lobbyists who profit from rising costs that have outstripped inflation for three decades.  Those costs do get spread across the area where the insurers do business, of course.

There's certainly no "perfect" system, and there's big money riding on keeping things "as is,"  but one thing has become obvious to even the most casual observer:

There's lots of room for improvement in the current scheme, for finding a fairer way to distribute the costs while controlling the expenses, and the benefit of improvement will flow to you, and me, and our community - no matter if you think of community as the neighborhood, the city, the country, or the planet.

The "profit motive" is great. It brings consumers choices for fair trade coffee, and tea parties, and "out-of-season" blueberries, and Blackberries™, and a veritable plethora of choices for our transportation, wardrobes, and more. It also brings the cost of MRIs down in Japan, by orders of magnitude when compared to what we pay in the USA - why is that? Because we've let the system of paying for health care mimic a competitive market, and fallen for the eristic rhetoric that preserves the profits of these gargantuan companies, sometimes operating as virtual monopolies. In practice it's not possible for a consumer to make a real, let alone well-informed choice, about health care costs or insurance.

The Congressional Budget Office has notified Congress that tethering a public option to Medicare reimbursement rates would save the government $110 billion! That's more than even a "public option" in which the government has to negotiate rates with doctors and other health care providers, which the GOP seems so opposed to. There are LOTS of ways to improve the bottom line -- but the bottom line is:
It's time to get the profit motive out of health care insurance.

Read more?