"Chocolate: The Bitter Truth"

I’m sure we have a lot of chocolate lovers among our community and let me tell you, I’m one of them. All kinds and shapes, pure or mixed, dark or milky.

Chocolate is also known for it’s very high antioxidant proprieties, or more accurately it is the Cocoa (Cacao bean), that chocolate is made of. That’s another reason why dark chocolate – with a high cacao content – is better for you.

But did you know that the chocolate industry supports Child Labour???

I was shocked while watching a documentary the other day. Children that should be in school are trafficked for money and forced to work becoming cocoa slaves. It’s a very sad truth.

Here is a piece copied from the CBC website about it:

“Chocolate is a multi-billion dollar global industry, but, nearly a decade after key players signed a pledge to eradicate child labour, little has been done to implement it. This special investigation highlights the continuing abuse children suffer in the production of chocolate, despite repeated promises of reform.

This film shows that the chocolate industry still supports child labour through its supply chain, that child labour is still rife in the fields and that the industry has made few moves to eradicate it or the child trafficking behind it.

Over 40% of the world’s cocoa is sourced from the west African region of Cote d’Ivoire, and the UN estimates that there are around 15,000 children working on the region’s cocoa farms. These include children as young as eight years old, many from neighbouring Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana, who are trafficked across borders and used as forced labour.

In 2001 the chocolate industry signed up to the Harkin Engel Protocol in which it promised “industry wide standards of public certification…that cocoa beans and their derivative products are free of the worst forms of child labour”.

Reported by Paul Kenyon for BBC.”

Click here to view the full documentary if you are interested.

I know that I will make better choices when buying chocolate from now on.

And you? What’s your opinion?

TUESDAY WOD

Remember that today’s wod is part of the fitness rating!

OLYMPIC WEIGHTLIFTING TOTAL

- 1 Rep Max Snatch

- 1 Rep Max Clean and Jerk

Take as many attempts as you want, just make sure you are done at the top of the hour!

Add up you numbers and post your scores.

Have fun

Fancypants.