Reverse Trick-or-Treat!

The Campaign

"Reverse Trick-or-Treat" is a campaign that brings together a wide range of people who support Fair Trade and who are bringing it to you this Halloween.

Across the country, volunteers are going door-to-door to give out free Fair Trade chocolate and a little bit of information.

There's really no trick, just a treat and some food for thought.

In particular, have you ever given much thought to the chocolate you buy?

Most people are surpised to learn that the farmers who grow the cocoa and sugar cane so important to our delicious treats, often don't get such a sweet deal.

Cocoa

Cocoa is a huge part of the economies of thirty developing countries, and more than 14 million people depend on it for their livelihoods. Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana alone provide more than 60% of the world's cocoa, and 90% of all cocoa is grown on small family farms of 5 hectares or less.

While being small can have its advantages, for cocoa farmers, being small means having to take whatever prices you can get, and that often isn't very much. Volatile prices, powerful buyers, and occasionally political instability can conspire to create prices too low to even cover cocoa farmers' costs of production, let alone meet the needs of their families.

In the worst cases, this has led to documented cases of child slavery on larger farms in Côte d'Ivoire in Western Africa. According to a recent UNICEF report, there are nearly 300,000 children working in Ivorian cocoa farms, many of whom are unpaid, receive no schooling, engage in hazardous work, and are not free to leave.

Sugar

Sugar cane producers also often have trouble finding good prices. Much like small-scale cocoa farmers, this can in part be attributed to their small size and lack of power compared with buyers.

But sugar prices are further complicated by large subsidies for sugar beets grown in the United States, Europe, and (formerly) Canada. Subsidies artificially drive prices down, often well below the costs of other farmers who don't receive these extra payments from their governments.

Fair Trade Certified Chocolate

Chocolate that bears either of the Fair Trade labels (seen at the top left of your screen) has been independently verified to meet international Fair Trade standards. That means the cocoa and sugar cane came from democratic associations of small-scale farmers (usually cooperatives) that were paid a fair price for their produce, benefited from longer-term contracts, and had access to affordable credit if they asked for it.

As well, Fair Trade standards prohibit children from participating in any work that is hazardous, prevents them from attending school, or otherwise interferes with their life chances. Forced labour of any kind is also strictly prohibited.

Special thanks

This year's Reverse Trick-or-Treat Campaign in Canada has been a joint effort and would not have been possible without support from: