Comments on Jer's review of Mint
dagoba chocolate owned by hershey corporation
dagoba chocolate was bought-out and is owned by the hershey corporation. even though the chocolate for dagoba may be fair-trade by buying it you support a company that has very un-sustainable practices including sourcing chocolate from child-slave labor in the ivory coast...here's an excerpt from an Organic Consumer Association article:
Hershey's and M&M/Mars control two-thirds of the U.S. chocolate market, which generated $13 billion from retail sales of 3.1 billion pounds of chocolate in 2001. Both companies, along with other major producers like Nestlé, Archer Daniels Midland, Cadbury, Guittard and Bernard Callebaut, import cocoa beans from the Ivory Coast, which, as the largest cocoa producer in the world, provides almost half the cocoa beans that end up in America. Most of the cocoa from the Ivory Coast comes from 450,000 small farms of 12 acres or less. In September 2000, a BBC documentary entitled "Slavery: A Global Investigation" featured a segment on boys enslaved on Ivory Coast cocoa farms, showing children with heavily scarred backs from beatings with whips and switches. Awareness of the problem became more widespread in June 2001, when a four-part Knight Ridder series on the same topic told the stories of boys in the Ivory Coast, most of them 12 to 16 years old, some as young as 9, who had been sold and then tricked into indentured labor on cocoa farms.
(www.organicconsumers.org/starbucks/021603_fair_trade.cfm)
a great website that lists many of the corporate parent ownerships of "natural" foods is:
www.msu.edu/%7Ehowardp/organicindustry.html
it has an excellent chart detailing many of the corporate buy-outs that have taken place.
Jer's keywords: dagoba, chocolate, fair trade, corporate ownership, natural foods, organic industry structure
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Jenn A. says:
It's a very complicated issue -- it's the equivalent of holding the city of Berkeley responsible where a farmer who brings produce to the farmer's market beats his kids. Hershey's buys from companies which, in turn, buy from smaller farmers and growers. Their purchase of Dagoba is a way for them to show support of the values and promises that Dagoba makes.