Saturday, August 20, 2011

"Before you've finished your breakfast this morning, you'll have relied on half the world"   - Martin Luther King Jr.

Stop and ponder the relationship we have with the unseen producers, artisans and farmers across the globe - the people who sewed your shirt, picked your coffee beans, crafted your jewelry, cultivated your cocoa and picked your morning banana.  Do you think they received a fair wage, had the privilege of decent working conditions or could provide their children with an education?  Unfortunately, the answer in most cases is no.

There are an estimated 1.4 billion people living in poverty and existing on less than $1.25 per day.  Did you know that 15,000 children aged 9 to 12 in the Ivory Coast alone have been sold into forced labor on  conventional cotton, coffee, and cocoa plantations and that 284,000 children in the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon are working in hazardous tasks on conventional cocoa farms?  Good news is that you can do something about this!