Chocolate sweetens global community with each and every fairly-traded morsel

October is Fair Trade Month!

Good news arrives for chocolate lovers with each new study touting its health benefits. What could be sweeter than savoring the rich, satisfying taste of one of the world’s favorite flavors knowing that it may help to keep your blood pressure down, your blood flowing freely and your heart healthy?

Fair Trade cocoa and chocolate offer even more restorative advantages than providing antioxidants to attack free radicals in your body  — they affect you in a way no other chocolate can. A warm glow fills your heart when you help your global neighbors help themselves. No wonder Catholic Relief Services calls its Fair Trade product “Divine” chocolate.

(Photo courtesy of CRS)

Divine Chocolate bars are made with 100 percent Fair Trade cocoa grown by farmers of the Kuapa Kokoo cooperative in Ghana, West Africa, who pick the beans by hand. The added blessings from eating this chocolate come from knowing that the 47,000 farmers who grow the cocoa are not only given a fair price for their crop — 20 to 40 percent more than the conventional market price — but they also own 45 percent of the company that turns their cocoa into Divine Chocolate bars.

Your heart continues to beat with joy as you learn that no exploitative child labor was allowed in the growing or harvesting of the cocoa, women’s rights were promoted and that the cooperative also invests proceeds from its sales in community projects like health clinics and sanitation systems. Divine Chocolate is made from all natural ingredients and uses no genetically modified organisms. (It comes as no surprise that the recipes on their website are also “heavenly.”)

Equal Exchange Fair Trade Program

Coffee grown in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. 

(Photo by Michael Sheridan for CRS)

Equal Exchange, a worker-owned cooperative, is a member of the CRS Fair Trade Program, which offers organic fairly-traded chocolate, coffee and other products. Equal Exchange, which started its first Fair Trade program with coffee growers in Nicaragua in 1986, has continued to develop many trading partnerships around the world, all of which support small-scale farmers and their families. They are building a better food system through their trade model which values farmers, consumers and the earth instead of the profit-driven industrialized agribusinesses that rely on exploited labor and harmful chemicals.

Equal Exchange’s organic fairly-traded gourmet chocolate bars, hot cocoa and baking cocoa mixes are made with cocoa from farmer cooperatives in the Dominican Republic, Panama and Peru; fairly-traded organic evaporated cane sugar from cooperatives in Paraguay and Costa Rica; fairly-traded vanilla from Madagascar and organic milk powder from U.S. dairy cooperatives.

Fairly-traded fine quality organic teas from small-scale farmers in India, Sri Lanka and South Africa are another of Equal Exchange’s successful partnering projects. In addition, they work with growers in the U.S. to offer packaged snacks including organic dried sweetened cranberries, tamari roasted almonds from the small organic farmers of Big Tree Organic Farms Coop in central California and salted pecans from the members of Southern Alternatives Agricultural Cooperative in southwest Georgia.

Sustainable farming “greens the earth”

Cacao beans drying. (Photo by Michael Sheridan for CRS)

Equal exchange is committed to supporting sustainable farming methods that help “green the earth” through reforestation, natural resource conservation and organic practices. The agricultural practices of their small-scale farmer partners help cool the planet, protect the environment, and restore local eco-systems. After the crops leave the farmers you can be assured that integrity was maintained during the processing of the end products.

You won’t notice the difference in your wallet when purchasing Fair Trade products through Equal Exchange and CRS. Their prices are comparable to those you would pay in a grocery store.

There’s no price, however, that can be placed on the dignity and self-reliance created for thousands of small-scale farmers around the globe nurturing the earth and, in turn, our own hearts and souls when we choose to support Fair Trade in every way we can. CJK

Tomorrow’s special treat: Equal Exchange Brownies.