Imagine, for a moment, answering your door on Halloween night to this scenario: a smiling child hands you a shard of chocolate. Not an ordinary chunk of chocolate, but a bit made with chocolate that has been grown and harvested by workers who are not under-age, not under-paid, and not exploited in any manner.
Sponsored by a human rights group called Global Exchange, this game of Reverse Halloween is now in its second year. You can find out more about this new twist on a weary ritual, by visiting the website of Reverse-Trick-or-Treating, at
http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade/cocoa/reversetrickortreating/
The website tells us more, including this ...
Thousands of costumed trick-or-treaters across all fifty states in the US, as well as Canada, are turning the traditional Halloween ritual on its head; for the second year in a row, it is the trick-or-treaters who are handing out chocolate...hundreds of thousands of Fair Trade Certified™ chocolate samples to raise awareness of: the persistent problems of poverty in cocoa-growing communities; the use of exploited child labor in the cocoa fields of countries like Cote D'Ivoire, which produces 40 percent of the world's cocoa; and environmental damage from unsustainable farming practices.
Participants will reach out to nearly a quarter of a million households in the United States and Canada in a single night with their important message: Fair Trade Certified™ chocolate provides Americans, who consume nearly half the world's chocolate, with a path toward resolving these problems.
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