Speaker 1: Also media. It's spoky week that can happen here. It's
Speaker 1: spooky week, the week where things are spooky. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Mia Wong, and with me is Garrison. Hello, and today
Speaker 1: all right, right, we've gotten we've gotten, we've gotten the
Speaker 1: preliminary spooky out and so today we're gonna be talking
Speaker 1: about one of the sort of key elements of Halloween,
Speaker 1: and that is chocolate and so on. On a very
Speaker 1: basic level, we're going to ask what is chocolate? And
Speaker 1: the answer, and it pains me to say this to
Speaker 1: someone who really loves chocolate is really really bleak. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but before we get into exactly how bleak it is, uh,
Speaker 1: we're gonna look at sort of the early history of chocolate.
Speaker 1: So most so, okay, there's there's a lot of disagreement
Speaker 1: about exactly how old chocolate is. I've seen sources that
Speaker 1: say three thousand BC. I've seen sources that say seventeen
Speaker 1: hundred BC. The seventeen hundred BC is the one that's
Speaker 1: pretty consistent. It seems like the Olmecs had something like chocolate.
Speaker 1: That's it. It's a sort of bitter drink that they
Speaker 1: sometimes to put vanilla or red pepper.
Speaker 2: In Yeah, it was, it was. It was. It was
Speaker 2: like a bitter slurry that you from what I hear,
Speaker 2: not very enjoyable, but it got you like really high,
Speaker 2: like not high like like like weed, but like kind
Speaker 2: of like cocaine. It was. It was like it was
Speaker 2: it was a massive stimulant.
Speaker 1: Is yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, from what I hear about these kind of early
Speaker 2: gross bitter chocolate slurries.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And you know, I mean this is a thing
Speaker 1: that's this is not a regular consumption drink. Basically everyone
Speaker 1: he uses this and this and chocolate is consumed by
Speaker 1: a bunch of different civilisations, like across like most of
Speaker 1: South America. There's something sort of like the Mayans obviously,
Speaker 1: the Mayans and the Aztecs too. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: places where where this is being used, and it's everyone
Speaker 1: seems to use it for ritual purposes. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: at some point the I think it was the the
Speaker 1: Olemex at some point we're doing these like they were
Speaker 1: making fermented alcohol out of so so normally with with chocolate,
Speaker 1: you're using like the cocoa beans, right, but there's like
Speaker 1: a flesh and the flute fruit around the beans and
Speaker 1: they were making like a fermented thing out of that,
Speaker 1: and I don't know, I leave as an exercise to
Speaker 1: the reader with you count that as chocolate. But the
Speaker 1: sort of conventional story goes okay. So like several thousand
Speaker 1: years after the Olmes, the Assex and the Mayans using
Speaker 1: it for ritual purposes and the story basically is okay.
Speaker 1: So Herman Cortes drink chocolate with stick King Maktazuma. Cortes goes,
Speaker 1: this is bitter as shit and sucks ass, but he
Speaker 1: brings it back to Europe anyways, and in Europe they
Speaker 1: mix it with sugar and also with honey, but mostly
Speaker 1: with sugar, and it becomes, you know, it becomes very
Speaker 1: very popular drinking Europe. And at some point, this is
Speaker 1: like the eighteen forty so like like takes some about
Speaker 1: like three hundred years to figure out how to make
Speaker 1: cocoa powder. But once you have cocoa powder, you can
Speaker 1: It's not it ceases to be bitter like it in
Speaker 1: the in the way that it sort of is naturally.
Speaker 2: You can you can process it with like like like
Speaker 2: basic solutions, which which neutralizes some of the acidic and
Speaker 2: bitter bitter tastes, which is why you should always buy
Speaker 2: a Dutch process cocoa powder, which is unfortunately hard to
Speaker 2: find these days. But it is, it is, it is,
Speaker 2: it is the shit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's let's that's actually yeah, so the that's
Speaker 1: that's Dutch cocoa. And then twenty years later someone figures
Speaker 1: out how to make them into a chocolate bar, and
Speaker 1: you know, sort of a law, you have chocolate. Now.
Speaker 1: The conventional histories are missing something very, very imp which
Speaker 1: is something that defined has defined the production of chocolate
Speaker 1: since Europeans got a hold of it and continues to
Speaker 1: define it today. And that thing is slavery. Yeah, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: And you know this is slavery is a very sort
Speaker 1: of important part of the history of chocolate because slavery
Speaker 1: is what transforms the older ritual chocolate used by a
Speaker 1: bunch of different indigenous societies for several thousand years, into
Speaker 1: modern chocolate. And this is this is a point that
Speaker 1: I want to make because most most histories of chocolate tend,
Speaker 1: you know, when they're trying to find the origin of
Speaker 1: modern chocolate, they go, oh, it's chocolate bar. And I
Speaker 1: think they're wrong. I think they're very wrong. I think
Speaker 1: the distinct European innovation of chocolate is to add sugar
Speaker 1: to it. Yes, and this raises the very bleak question
Speaker 1: where does sugar come from? And the answer, of course
Speaker 1: is slavery. Sugar is one of the primary crops of
Speaker 1: slave economies in both the colonies and the West Indies.
Speaker 1: It is one of the key elements of the so
Speaker 1: called triangle trade where you know, you may have you
Speaker 1: probably have learned this in school, but you know, for people,
Speaker 1: for people who've been out of school for a long time.
Speaker 1: So the triangle trade is Europe. Since manufacturer goes to Africa.
Speaker 1: It trades that fruit enslaved people and slave people taken
Speaker 1: from Africa to the colonies and sometimes to America, sometimes
Speaker 1: to the colonies in the West Indies. Uh. And then
Speaker 1: they take you know, the products of slavery from plantations
Speaker 1: back to Europe. And that's you know, rice, indigo, tobacco, cotton, molasses, rum,
Speaker 1: and critically sugar back to Europe. Actually, wait, did did
Speaker 1: they Did they teach you the triangle trade?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yes, I mean I I I did learn. My
Speaker 2: Christian Homescholling curriculum wasn't the best, but we did, we did.
Speaker 2: We did cover some basic things.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because the triangle trade as a model, like
Speaker 1: isn't that old, even though even though like this is
Speaker 1: the way that we all understand, like Tyler sort of
Speaker 1: colonial trade work, it's a kind of recent thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So sugar. Sugar is a very very key part of
Speaker 1: this entire thing. And there's a very very famous this
Speaker 1: sort of classic study of sugar and slavery is Sydney W.
Speaker 1: Mintz's Sweetness and Power, which is a fundamental tax and
Speaker 1: a lot of sort of uh a lot of the
Speaker 1: sort of fields around the study of slavery. And one
Speaker 1: of his arguments is that the British industrial proletariat is
Speaker 1: fueled by slave sugar because the sugar is a stimulant
Speaker 1: that you know, they're putting it in tea, which another stimulant.
Speaker 1: They're putting it in whatever they drink, and this is
Speaker 1: a thing that allows them to keep working for longer
Speaker 1: than they otherwise would have been able to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this also was the origin of Britain's probably
Speaker 2: largest cultural trait, bad teeth.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And you know, so so this is this is
Speaker 1: this is a many aspects of British culture I've are
Speaker 1: descended from from slavery and you know, but the the
Speaker 1: other the other important thing for our stories that sugar
Speaker 1: is what makes chocolate sort of palatable to Europeans. And
Speaker 1: and this isn't a sort of interesting thing that Europeans do.
Speaker 1: You know they do this with tobacco too. You haven't
Speaker 1: you have something that you're only supposed to use in
Speaker 1: fairly small amounts for ritual purposes, right, And the Europeans
Speaker 1: are like, okay, but what if we purified the shit
Speaker 1: out of it and they just ate it literally every day?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Have you ever tried like unsweetened on like chocolate liquor?
Speaker 1: Fucking sucks? I hate it. It's not good.
Speaker 2: You can certainly nibble, it can be a fun novelty
Speaker 2: to nibble, but you certainly wouldn't want to eat like
Speaker 2: a whole bar of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's some real hope boy. Yeah. So, like,
Speaker 1: I mean, it makes sense that they added sugar to it.
Speaker 1: But the consequence of this is that we can ask
Speaker 1: we can finally ask the question right now now, now
Speaker 1: that it's been transformed by sugar into this object a
Speaker 1: sort of popular consumption, we can ask the question what
Speaker 1: is chocolate? And the answer is that chocolate is colonialism
Speaker 1: plus slavery. It is a fusion of coca, which is
Speaker 1: an indigenous ritual drink sees is a part of the
Speaker 1: wages of colonialism by the European empires, and sugar a
Speaker 1: slave crop that drove the colonial prontation economy. And you know,
Speaker 1: you might say me, you know you're being harsh here, right,
Speaker 1: even if we accept your argument about chocolate and the
Speaker 1: sixteen hundred, surely, surely that's not sure. Now, wasn't wasn't.
Speaker 2: Wasn't slavery abolished in the eighteen hundreds, And now I assume,
Speaker 2: I assume Nestle's barving practices are totally above fort see.
Speaker 1: And this is I think the interesting part of the
Speaker 1: story is gare like our readers is assuming a thing
Speaker 1: I'm about to launch into here is the Mars Nestley
Speaker 1: Child slavery lawsuit. And we will because that is a
Speaker 1: critical elements of slavery and chocolate production. But there is
Speaker 1: also still slavery and sugar production capitalism. And not only
Speaker 1: is there slavery and sugar production, there is slavery in
Speaker 1: sugar production in the exact same place there were slavery
Speaker 1: in sugar production five hundred years ago. And this is
Speaker 1: one of the sort of stunning things about you know,
Speaker 1: the miss of capitalism, right, which is that, Okay, capitalism
Speaker 1: has had four hundred you know, I'm gonna give them
Speaker 1: a bit of credit and be like, Okay, I don't know,
Speaker 1: like I'm gonna I'm gonna give capitalism a little bit
Speaker 1: of credit and give it only was being responsible for
Speaker 1: four hundred years of this and not five hundred years
Speaker 1: of this because you know, whatever complicated arguments about whether
Speaker 1: the capitalist transition is in the fifteen hundred and sixty hundreds,
Speaker 1: but you know, they have had four hundred years to
Speaker 1: solve the problem of slavery on Hispaniola. Has it done that? No,
Speaker 1: it is there is still slavery on the island of
Speaker 1: Fifthpaniola four hundred years later. We're going to be discussing
Speaker 1: in a second. Still the best possible thing here is
Speaker 1: that maybe and this is it is arguable, maybe last
Speaker 1: year they're stopped being slaves there. Now I don't even
Speaker 1: think that. I don't think that's true. And we're going
Speaker 1: to get into that, but you know, before before we
Speaker 1: sort of launch into you know what, like whether or
Speaker 1: not there are so slaves on Tecker replantations, in the
Speaker 1: Dominican Republic. If you have had four hundred years to
Speaker 1: solve a problem and you have not solved it, you
Speaker 1: are never going to solve it.
Speaker 2: Hey, hey, let's not let's not visionhole ourselves here. There's
Speaker 2: a lot of things that have been around for four
Speaker 2: hundred years that ought not to be.
Speaker 1: That's true. But if you are an economic system and
Speaker 1: your economic system has been you are supposed to have
Speaker 1: you are supposed to have dealt with this at least
Speaker 1: two hundred years ago. But you know, we've arrived here,
Speaker 1: and this is something we've talked about before in the
Speaker 1: show at least a bit. We've arrived here at one
Speaker 1: of the real weaknesses of both sort of liberal and
Speaker 1: radical accounts of how the capitalist economy works, because both
Speaker 1: sets of accounts as their starting point the fact that
Speaker 1: capitalism is based on free labor, that it's free people
Speaker 1: who enter into contracts to sell you their labor, and
Speaker 1: that forced labor is this sort of like hauled over
Speaker 1: from older economic systems.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 2: I actually just saw a thing today on the dying
Speaker 2: Remains of Twitter about how capitalism is the only economic
Speaker 2: system that's not based on exploitation of violence.
Speaker 3: It's based on free trade between markets. It's like people
Speaker 3: really believe this shit. It's like I don't know, Like
Speaker 3: I don't know. So at some point I'm going to
Speaker 3: do an episode about really good.
Speaker 1: Book whose name I'm forgetting right now because I didn't
Speaker 1: look this up beforehand. But there's a really good book
Speaker 1: on the sort of dueling forced labor systems driving the
Speaker 1: tea economy in the late eighteen hundred, so that there's
Speaker 1: there's one forced labor system in China and a different
Speaker 1: forced labor system in India that are both warring in
Speaker 1: each other to control the tea market.
Speaker 2: It is certainly interesting how much tea has impacted like geopolitics.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, we'll do an episode on that one day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: tea's not.
Speaker 2: That great, guys. I'm sorry, it's fine.
Speaker 1: Not ta rips. I would not we just don't have
Speaker 1: good tea here.
Speaker 2: I would not do as much killing as people have done.
Speaker 1: It's not worth killing anyone over the number of people
Speaker 1: who've been killed over it is like early.
Speaker 2: Gray is fine on like a rainy afternoon, but come on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not. It's not worth like conquering continents for huh.
Speaker 1: But okay, so well, back back back to this sort
Speaker 1: of main plot that is not tea, that is in
Speaker 1: fact chocolate. So one of the things that we can
Speaker 1: learn that we learn from this is that, you know,
Speaker 1: forced labor is not just a holdover. It's been a
Speaker 1: It's been a central part of capitalism for as long
Speaker 1: as capitalism has existed, and given its current track record,
Speaker 1: it will be a part of capitalism for as long
Speaker 1: as it exists. And you know, so, there's always been
Speaker 1: a racial component to this, right And this is like
Speaker 1: trivially obvious, right, Like, there's a racial component of slavery, Like,
Speaker 1: holy shit, it's mostly about race. But I think, you know,
Speaker 1: we can we can expand this a little bit and
Speaker 1: it gets you to a some sort of interesting things,
Speaker 1: which is that race is one of you know, so
Speaker 1: like obviously capitalism is supposed to be based on wage labor,
Speaker 1: but race is what mediates your access to wage labor
Speaker 1: in the first place. So, you know, white, like if
Speaker 1: you're an American, right like, white Americans have basically always
Speaker 1: been able to get access to to wage labor, you know,
Speaker 1: And as shitty as wage labor is, it's it's not
Speaker 1: as bad as the other things you can get forced
Speaker 1: into you know. But yeah, so like if you're black,
Speaker 1: like you know, you get as successive forms of slavery.
Speaker 1: If you're indigenous, they tried to enslave you and then
Speaker 1: either sort of kept doing it or gave up and
Speaker 1: just killed did the genocide Asian people like who came
Speaker 1: to this continents and also sort of the West Indies
Speaker 1: largely get debt pion engine and entered service to you
Speaker 1: and you can you can sort of work this out
Speaker 1: so on and so forth. There's there's different like modes
Speaker 1: of stuff that are the normal sort of like what
Speaker 1: you by default have access to if you are ex race, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And obviously this this sort of racial access to wage
Speaker 1: labor is spread across the world. You know, your your
Speaker 1: access to wage labor is dependent on sort of your
Speaker 1: subject position as colonizer colonize as well as you know,
Speaker 1: your sort of global and also you're like local racial
Speaker 1: hierarchies because oh boy, can that shit be really fucked up.
Speaker 1: But the upshot of this is that many of the
Speaker 1: descendants of enslaved Haitian people are still effectively enslaved today
Speaker 1: on sugar plantations than making republic. And so we're gonna
Speaker 1: we're gonna tell that story. But first word, oh god,
Speaker 1: do you know what doesn't know? I cannot guarantee that
Speaker 1: our products and services are slave free like I wish
Speaker 1: I could.
Speaker 2: But well, do you know what is also here for
Speaker 2: a spooky time this Halloween. That's right, these products and services.
Speaker 1: Okay, we are back.
Speaker 2: I'm drinking my not mocha coffee, drinking my regular unsweetened coffee.
Speaker 2: Is therefore totally fine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm everything. Nothing bad, nothing bad has ever happened
Speaker 1: in the history of coffee.
Speaker 2: No, I'm here, no tea, no chocolate. I'm safe. I'm good.
Speaker 1: Anyway. So unfortunately, the people who are not safe is
Speaker 1: uh a Haitians in the Jamaican Republic. So we are
Speaker 1: not going to do an entire history of slavery in
Speaker 1: the Jamaican Republic because.
Speaker 2: Because this is a chocolate episode, and yeah, we have
Speaker 2: so much time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, for many reasons. But one of the
Speaker 1: things that happened in in So we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 1: look at sort of the like the modern history of this,
Speaker 1: and by modern, I'm starting it in I'm starting it
Speaker 1: in the eighties because I have to pick up place now.
Speaker 1: One of the things that happens in the nineteen eighties
Speaker 1: is that the Dominican Army effectively so goes into Haiti
Speaker 1: or just recruitation people who are in the Dominican Republic
Speaker 1: and are like, hey, you're gonna okay, we have like
Speaker 1: jobs for you, like come like do this work. And
Speaker 1: so a bunch of people get in like these like
Speaker 1: army vans and then they get there and they get
Speaker 1: worshed out of the van. A bunch of guys point
Speaker 1: guns at them and go, you're gonna work for free
Speaker 1: or we're gonna or like or we're gonna kill you.
Speaker 1: So this is really bad. And this is this is
Speaker 1: how a lot of like through the eighties and kind
Speaker 1: of early nineties, this is how a lot of sugar
Speaker 1: production worked in the Dominican Republic. And you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's very notable here that Dominican Republic produces a lot
Speaker 1: of sugar, and it produces a lot of sugar that
Speaker 1: specifically the US uses. Now, this is like state run
Speaker 1: slavery right on, sort of like state run plantations. So
Speaker 1: then we had neoliberalism and so the state run plantations
Speaker 1: get privatized. However, come they still run on slave labor.
Speaker 1: So there's a very good Mother Jones report about this.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna read some of it here. Kakata is one
Speaker 1: of about one hundred, according to a local missionaries estimate,
Speaker 1: isolated camp scattered around Central roman. Central Romana is a
Speaker 1: giant sugar plantation. Central Romana's one hundred and sixty thousand
Speaker 1: acres of sugar cane attract almost as big as New
Speaker 1: York City. Most of the workers and their families live
Speaker 1: in these battaiyas, rising in the morning to work the
Speaker 1: cane and the punishing heats, clearing weeds, slashing and spraying
Speaker 1: the stalks. Nearly all are men of Haitian descent. Some
Speaker 1: were traffic back in the day of the journalist is
Speaker 1: doing this was the guy who basically uncovered a bunch
Speaker 1: of the original armies like the military slavery program in
Speaker 1: the nineties, and so he went back like a couple
Speaker 1: of years ago. So he's talking himself of Some of
Speaker 1: the people were traffic back touring the military slavery program.
Speaker 1: Others were born and lived stateless, and others came from
Speaker 1: hating Moore recently paying smugglers to sneak them across the
Speaker 1: border for years, the government has resisted providing legal status
Speaker 1: to people of Haitian heritage in the country, even though
Speaker 1: born there and estimated two hundred thousand people who for
Speaker 1: generations have been to mean by race and class are stateless.
Speaker 1: For the men in the camps, Sentra Romana is the state.
Speaker 1: Their villages are patrolled by armed company police empowered to evict.
Speaker 1: Centraro Romana owns the land or the Haitians work the
Speaker 1: railcars where they wigh and load the can and stocks,
Speaker 1: and the dwellings where they sleep. They are miles from
Speaker 1: the nearest Dominican town not controlled by the company. So
Speaker 1: things going great here and the conditions you know, okay,
Speaker 1: so the sort of the capitalist reforms and ioliberalism has
Speaker 1: brought to this system are the number of child slaves
Speaker 1: has decreased dramatically, because that was a big thing when
Speaker 1: the first reporting, when everyone was like, holy shit, there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of child slaves. This is a terrible Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we have less child slaves, right, and you know,
Speaker 1: so instead of the child slaves, right, it's now mostly adults.
Speaker 1: But the conditions here are still effectively slavery. Even even
Speaker 1: after this sort of child slavery stuff like is driven under.
Speaker 1: On a good day, these workers make three dollars a
Speaker 1: day and they are effectively and sometimes literally unable to leave. Now,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of reasons for this. One of
Speaker 1: the big ones is that most of the workers there
Speaker 1: are most like basically all like you might find a
Speaker 1: worker somewhere who isn't stuck in this, but they're caught
Speaker 1: in these debt traps by Central Romana, who and these
Speaker 1: are like classic company but they're not. They're worse than like,
Speaker 1: you know, the classic American company town because at least
Speaker 1: an American company town, you can go to another town
Speaker 1: that is not controlled by the company, whereas these people
Speaker 1: like cannot, and so they're caught in these debt traps
Speaker 1: by Central Romana, which is the company that owns these plantations.
Speaker 1: And because they're so in debt, they're constantly forced to
Speaker 1: work for the company in order to pay off their debt.
Speaker 1: But you know, they never actually make enough money to
Speaker 1: pay the debt off, and so they have to take
Speaker 1: on more debt to survive until you know, and largely
Speaker 1: what happens is these people work there in debt until
Speaker 1: they die. This is classic debt Pia nine where it
Speaker 1: sort of debt transforms people into the effective property of
Speaker 1: the debt holder, who exacerbate the debt by denying them
Speaker 1: the ability to live without taking on more debt. A
Speaker 1: very common way this happens is with medical debt, which
Speaker 1: is something you know, I think we're familiar with to
Speaker 1: some extent here, but is egregiously worse. And the other
Speaker 1: thing that I was realizing about this is that this
Speaker 1: is actually really eerily similar to the way that Cortez
Speaker 1: and the Conquistadores and slaved indigenous people during the genocide.
Speaker 1: They would do the same thing of like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: now you're in debt to me, and because you can't
Speaker 1: pay the debt, you have five hundred percent interest per week,
Speaker 1: and so you know, that just accumulates, and now you
Speaker 1: work for me for the rest of your lives. And
Speaker 1: this is you know, this, this is one of the
Speaker 1: one of the sort of ways in which this the
Speaker 1: long shadow of Spanish imperialism like looms over the Dominican Republic,
Speaker 1: even in what has really been about two hundred years
Speaker 1: of the age of the American Empire. You know, and
Speaker 1: as you know, obviously like as much of an effect
Speaker 1: as the Spanish empire has had here and oh god,
Speaker 1: it's not good today. It is the American empire that
Speaker 1: lines the pockets of the slavers of the Dominican Republic.
Speaker 1: So such a Romana is owned by this this family
Speaker 1: called the Funjewel family, who are these Cuban expats who
Speaker 1: run this like enormous resort in shit where they live
Speaker 1: in Florida and are handed. This is really fun. One
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty million dollars for the American state every
Speaker 1: year in the form of price supports for sugar. So like,
Speaker 1: you're an American, right, Like obviously your tax money very
Speaker 1: obviously goes to support slavery because we have prisons, and
Speaker 1: so your taxes are paying to enslaved people, but your
Speaker 1: taxes are also paying for slavery and other countries. It's incredible,
Speaker 1: really really great stuff from the American political system here.
Speaker 1: And you know, and the way this has been maintained
Speaker 1: is through like two I think in the last twenty years.
Speaker 1: Mother Jones reported they've they've spent the sugar lobbyist spent
Speaker 1: two hundred and twenty million dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying,
Speaker 1: and it works really well. They've been able to influence
Speaker 1: the system for a very very long time. The other
Speaker 1: funny thing about the Fundtural family is that they've created
Speaker 1: the perfect political trap, which is so one of one
Speaker 1: of the brothers is like a Trump guy and the
Speaker 1: other person is a Hillary supporter, and they're both like
Speaker 1: incredibly a mesh in both of the circles. So it's great.
Speaker 1: Things are going very good. So after so the Mother
Speaker 1: Jones investigation was like in the last I think it
Speaker 1: was like last year the year before, and when the
Speaker 1: Mother Jones investigation about the fact that like all of
Speaker 1: this shit was still happening came out, uh, there was
Speaker 1: a there was a giant uproar about it. And a
Speaker 1: couple of things happened. One is that so the village
Speaker 1: of the journalists had visited, uh CenTra Romana, Like they
Speaker 1: didn't even bulldoze the villages. They blew everyone's houses down
Speaker 1: with like sledgehammers and forcibly move them to like other
Speaker 1: villages and separated people's families. So that's that's great. And
Speaker 1: then so in late twenty twenty two, under under pressure
Speaker 1: from this reporting, the US government like banned imports from
Speaker 1: that specific company. And okay, it's unclear what is going
Speaker 1: to happen with it, if you know, if if they're
Speaker 1: gonna get unbanned eventually, uh, if it's gonna stick, if
Speaker 1: they're just gonna like, I don't know, like transfer the
Speaker 1: assets to another company or something and use that instead.
Speaker 1: As so, as of right now, this specific set of
Speaker 1: plantations is not able to export sugar to the US.
Speaker 1: So this is this is as much of a victory
Speaker 1: over slavery as we're going to get in this episode.
Speaker 1: And this victory is that it's only gonna get work.
Speaker 1: This is this is the peak of anti slavery stuff
Speaker 1: we're gonna see here. Yeah, so enjoy it while you can.
Speaker 1: And do you know what else you should enjoy?
Speaker 2: Oh these products and services that support this podcast. That's good. Yes,
Speaker 2: this is this is the real peak of the episode, folks.
Speaker 2: All right, I am rejuvenated by the advertising industrial complex.
Speaker 2: I feel ready to hear other tales of great progress.
Speaker 1: Woo Okay, So now we're now we're going to turn
Speaker 1: to the type of slavery that everyone, I think expected
Speaker 1: this episode to mostly be about, which is the fact
Speaker 1: that cocoa bean production is also largely produced by slave labor.
Speaker 1: So Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna read a bit from
Speaker 1: a report by the Food Empowerment Projects, which has done
Speaker 1: some very good work on most but like specifically slavery
Speaker 1: in West Africa. They're also one of the only media
Speaker 1: people I've ever seen talk about the fact that a
Speaker 1: lot of this stuff, it's not exactly the same, but
Speaker 1: a lot of the sort of slavery stuff also seems
Speaker 1: to be happening on plantations in Brazil, but there's effectively
Speaker 1: no coverage of it that's not in Portuguese. I don't know.
Speaker 1: So like, eventually, one day, I guess, like the fact
Speaker 1: that other places other than West Africa have slavery will
Speaker 1: hit the anglophone media class or whatever. But until then,
Speaker 1: I'm going to read this section. In West Africa, coco
Speaker 1: is a commodity crop grown primarily for x Coco is
Speaker 1: the Ivory Coast primary export. It makes up about half
Speaker 1: the country's agricultural export and volume. Most coco farmers earn
Speaker 1: less than one dollar a day and income below the
Speaker 1: extreme poverty line. As a result, they often resort to
Speaker 1: the use of child labor to keep their prices competitive.
Speaker 1: In many cases, yeah, yeah, this is one of the
Speaker 1: things that happens when you're reading about child slavery stuff
Speaker 1: is even people who like are trying to you know,
Speaker 1: draw attention to how bad this is. You get stuff
Speaker 1: like that that's like Jesus Christ. Yeah, so you know
Speaker 1: they're making sub one dollar a day, they're using child labor.
Speaker 1: In many cases, this includes what the International Labor Organization
Speaker 1: calls quote the worst form of child labor. These are
Speaker 1: defined as practices quote likely to harm the health, safety,
Speaker 1: or morals of children. Approximately two point one million children
Speaker 1: in Ivory Coast and Ghana work on cocoa farms, most
Speaker 1: of whom are likely exposed to the worst form of
Speaker 1: child labor. Which is also really good that like we've we've, we've,
Speaker 1: capitalism has finally reached the you know, the apex of
Speaker 1: its its control of the commanding heights of the world economy,
Speaker 1: which means that we're talking about we're trying to make
Speaker 1: tear lists of how bad child labor is.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I mean a whole bunch of child labor
Speaker 2: laws just got like rolled back across many states here. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a real great country. So it's very exciting. The
Speaker 2: children are for the mind.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's it's it's great, you know. So, so
Speaker 1: obviously a lot of the child slavery on cocoa farms
Speaker 1: are from sort of like larger I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: they are corporate, but from sort of like larger plantations,
Speaker 1: but also less. You think that it's better on family farms,
Speaker 1: No family farms, I mean, I guess it is technically
Speaker 1: better than like being kidnapped and enslaved, is merely doing
Speaker 1: child labor on your family, like.
Speaker 2: Just being born into these pretty pretty uh not great
Speaker 2: labor practices that you really have no say it or
Speaker 2: any agency whatsoever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And like you know, this is one of
Speaker 1: these things where like the economic conditions are so bad
Speaker 1: that people are people are facing impossible choices, and I
Speaker 1: think we can say that they make the wrong choice,
Speaker 1: which is a lot of Okay, So, like there are
Speaker 1: there were sort of different ways that children get trafficked
Speaker 1: into slavery work. A lot of them are sold by
Speaker 1: their own families who do not have enough resources to
Speaker 1: take care of them, and are like, okay, we'll basically
Speaker 1: sell these people so they can go do this job.
Speaker 1: And these families don't know that, like their child is
Speaker 1: about to be enslaved, right, they're just like, Okay, well
Speaker 1: they're going to go off and do work. But the
Speaker 1: other way that this happens is that kids from like
Speaker 1: villages in other countries. But there's a lot of focus
Speaker 1: on Mali as one of the places this happens for him.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so there's a lot of these effects what
Speaker 1: are effectively raids into into Molly from the Ivory Coast
Speaker 1: to like steal children. And it's also happens to Bikina Fosso,
Speaker 1: you know, and this gets to the point where, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna read a quote from of these from from
Speaker 1: this report again. In one village of Bikina Fosso, almost
Speaker 1: every mother in the village has had a child trafficked
Speaker 1: onto cocaine farms. Traffickers will then sell children to cocaine farmers.
Speaker 1: So this is like the worst paranoid fantasies of every
Speaker 1: American right winger, except it's you know, this is just
Speaker 1: how chocolate is made.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is you know, all of all of the
Speaker 2: Sound of Freedom guys, with all of you know, the
Speaker 2: whole uproar around that movie earlier this year, versus all
Speaker 2: of them, yeah, enjoying their little Eminem said, KitKat said, Hey,
Speaker 2: I like the occasion kid cats too. This is this
Speaker 2: is a massive profle.
Speaker 1: I I don't know, I really love chocolate. I have
Speaker 1: not eaten any chocolate since I started researching this, and
Speaker 1: I like and it's and it's but it sucks because
Speaker 1: it's like you can't you can't. And we're gonna get
Speaker 1: into board of this in a second, but like you
Speaker 1: can't like ethically consume your way out of this, right,
Speaker 1: like because the conditions.
Speaker 2: But free trade cocoa exists.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, Yeah, we're gonna get into that. But yeah,
Speaker 1: like there's there's no there's no actual systemic like there's
Speaker 1: no way that you can, like you can't change this
Speaker 1: stuff with your individual consumption habits. And you know that's
Speaker 1: something that's just really fucking bleak about this because these
Speaker 1: conditions are, I mean, as bad as you can possibly imagine.
Speaker 1: But the Food and Powerment Project describes like children as
Speaker 1: young as five are forced to work up to fourteen
Speaker 1: hours a day, like chopping down cocoa pods and then
Speaker 1: chopping them open with machetes. And sometimes these people get
Speaker 1: Sometimes these kids are using chainsaws to like clear wood,
Speaker 1: they clear down like forests. Yeah, and you know, okay,
Speaker 1: so this goes exactly how you expected to go, which
Speaker 1: is a bunch of these kids just have a bunch
Speaker 1: of fucking scars from when they've been slashed by machetes
Speaker 1: because again you're handing the machetes to children, some of
Speaker 1: whom are as young as five. And then they have
Speaker 1: to carry one hundred pound bags of cocoa beans through
Speaker 1: the jungle. And this is the thing that's also happening
Speaker 1: in the Tamaican Republic, and this happens a lot in
Speaker 1: a lot of places, is that they just get you know,
Speaker 1: when when companies want to spray like they're fars with pesticides, right,
Speaker 1: they don't even bother even like clearing people out, which
Speaker 1: might you know, help like a tiny bit to make
Speaker 1: them not like die from fucking poison. But no, these
Speaker 1: fucking dipshits just like spray them with toxic chemicals as
Speaker 1: they just like spray them with pesticides like a lot
Speaker 1: of whom are christinogiens a lot of And this is
Speaker 1: happening in the Dominican the surcane fields in the Dominican
Speaker 1: Republic too, and a lot of those people just fucking
Speaker 1: died because you know, they were stayed with these chemicals.
Speaker 1: There was a really terrible story of a guy who
Speaker 1: was trying to sue Central Romana and just fucking died
Speaker 1: from the like he wasn't able to get a pay
Speaker 1: off for a lawsuit because he died in twenty twenty
Speaker 1: before the lawsuit could like finish. So here's another great
Speaker 1: quote from the Food Empowerment Project. The farm owners using
Speaker 1: child labor usually provide the children with the cheapest food available,
Speaker 1: such as corn paste or the cassava and bananas that
Speaker 1: grow in the surrounding forest. In some cases, the children
Speaker 1: sleep on wooden planks and small windless buildings without access
Speaker 1: to clean water, sanitary bathrooms. And you know, another key
Speaker 1: part of this, right is like, okay, so the conditions
Speaker 1: are obviously unbearably bad, but you know, a key part
Speaker 1: of this, like any system of slavery, is the physical
Speaker 1: violence against the enslaved people who are repeatedly and often
Speaker 1: beaten and abused and tortured in ways that are very
Speaker 1: reminiscent of sort of like older epik of slavery if
Speaker 1: they try to escape. Now, this is the companies care
Speaker 1: about this to the extent that is bad. Pr Yes,
Speaker 1: and the charcot companies repeated, like the charcoal companies. Okay,
Speaker 1: they they signed a thing in the year two thousand
Speaker 1: where they said we're going to eliminate child's the worst
Speaker 1: forms of child slavery by two thousand and five.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like this is this has been a known issue
Speaker 2: for like over two decades.
Speaker 1: Now, Garrison, Yes, what year is it right now?
Speaker 2: The year of our Lord to us in twenty three.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they have been they have been promising to end
Speaker 1: child slavery in the Originally they're supposed to be end
Speaker 1: child flavery and then and then they scaled it down
Speaker 1: to the worst forms the worst. But they have been
Speaker 1: promising you could do this for longer than you have
Speaker 1: been alive, yes, correct, which is terrifying.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes.
Speaker 1: And and as we'll get into later, right, the number
Speaker 1: of child slaves is higher than it was when they
Speaker 1: started doing these child slave reduction efforts, so quote unquote
Speaker 1: reduction efforts which are just sort of pr bullshit. So
Speaker 1: industry lobbying groups are also very very powerful, and this
Speaker 1: is part of how this stuff persists. So the University
Speaker 1: of Chicago has a center called Norak, which is like
Speaker 1: a public Research Center. I don't know. I went to
Speaker 1: that fucking school. I don't trust any of these motherfuckers
Speaker 1: and ne or should you, because it turns out there
Speaker 1: was so okay. So they released this report on how
Speaker 1: bad child slavery is, right, but there was a leak
Speaker 1: of the original version of the report that was supposed
Speaker 1: to come out, and the original version of the report
Speaker 1: has the number of child slaves at like two point
Speaker 1: two million. Now, when the report actually comes out with
Speaker 1: no justification whatsoever and using a bunch of numbers for
Speaker 1: child slavery that are from before COVID nineteen, the Noak
Speaker 1: report was like, ah, there's only like one point six
Speaker 1: million child slaves. So six hundred thousand child slaves just
Speaker 1: sort of vanished in an editorial process after they got
Speaker 1: they came under fire from uh, the they came under
Speaker 1: fire from the chocolate lobby.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, let's uh, let's route that down. Makes it
Speaker 2: makes it easier to palace.
Speaker 1: And the other thing that it hides is that there's
Speaker 1: been a ten to fifteen percent increase in the number
Speaker 1: of child slaves working in like in the coat in
Speaker 1: Cocoa since COVID started. Because COVID has been a giant
Speaker 1: sort of you know, the economic damage that COVID caused
Speaker 1: forced a bunch of people into into, you know, increasingly
Speaker 1: desperate things. And you know, Okay, so we tease this
Speaker 1: a little bit, and you might be thinking, well, I
Speaker 1: can eat fair trade chocolate, right, I can pay ten
Speaker 1: dollars for a chocolate bars as a fair trade on it,
Speaker 1: and it will and that will make sure that I'm
Speaker 1: only eating chocolate produced by free labor. Nope, the certifications
Speaker 1: for the chocolate are fucking bullshit. You're still eating slave chocolate.
Speaker 1: The follow was an excerpt from a study conducted by
Speaker 1: the Corporate Accountability Lab on the failure of initiatives in
Speaker 1: the chocolate industry like certifications quote. In order to understand
Speaker 1: the gap between consumer perception and farmer impact better, we
Speaker 1: brought certified chocolate bars to villages where some or all
Speaker 1: of the farmers were certified. We held up the bar
Speaker 1: with the label and explained to the farmers what consumers
Speaker 1: expected out of the label, primarily that farmers were paired
Speaker 1: a fair price, earned a decent living, and certain practices
Speaker 1: like child labor and deforestation were not present. We also
Speaker 1: explained the difference in retail price between fair trade and
Speaker 1: uncertified chocolate. The overwhelming response from farmers to this information
Speaker 1: was shock and outrage. One farmer pulled out his worn
Speaker 1: shirt in front of him and asked if it looked
Speaker 1: like he earned a decent living. A woman in one
Speaker 1: village said, you can hardly afford to send to your
Speaker 1: children to school, so how could anyone think she earned
Speaker 1: a fair price? Are farmer consultations revealed virtually imperceptible differences
Speaker 1: between certified and uncertified farms in terms of living incomes, poverty, education,
Speaker 1: access to healthcare, farmer bargaining power, or access to information. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: all the people who are telling you they're doing some
Speaker 1: fair trade shit, they're keeping your money and the places
Speaker 1: they're getting it from are as fucked as her. She's yeah,
Speaker 1: so this is bad. Now. You might also think, Okay,
Speaker 1: we can get out of this by buying from coco cooperatives.
Speaker 1: Except except, and this is a wonderful thing that capitalism
Speaker 1: is brought on the world. Most coco collectives aren't actually
Speaker 1: like workers collect like aren't actually co ops.
Speaker 2: They're just all people's republic of chocolate farmers. I'm sure
Speaker 2: they're all a little red book.
Speaker 1: This is something actually, this is something that China actually pioneered,
Speaker 1: because there's there's a bunch of firms in China that
Speaker 1: are also technical. I talked about this in my episode
Speaker 1: of Bachelor's episode a long time ago about this milk
Speaker 1: company that poisoned three hundred thousand babies, and that company
Speaker 1: was technically a co op, but like it was a
Speaker 1: co op in the sense that there was a small
Speaker 1: group of workers who were basically managers who owned shares,
Speaker 1: and then they just hired every source everything out to
Speaker 1: independent contractors, so it functioned like a normal company. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is the thing. A lot this the cocoa
Speaker 1: trade stuff is actually worse because most of these things
Speaker 1: that are called co ops aren't even co ops at all.
Speaker 1: They're just set up by cocoa growers as like fake
Speaker 1: co ops. And there they are like a very very
Speaker 1: small number of of these coco farms that are actually
Speaker 1: workers cooperatives, but there's no way to tell which one
Speaker 1: is which unless you spend a bunch of time like
Speaker 1: actually going and tracking the cooperatives down. So there's no
Speaker 1: sort of like ethically way out of this, right, You're
Speaker 1: just kind of you're you know, like you can't. You
Speaker 1: can't eat your way out of this problem. And of
Speaker 1: course everything across the board, all the these conditions have
Speaker 1: gotten worse since the pandemic. So you know it's it's
Speaker 1: not only is capitalism not making things better every like,
Speaker 1: things are in fact getting worse. Now, all right, I
Speaker 1: promised you the lawsuits. We're gonna talk a bit about
Speaker 1: the lawsuits. So there were actually two big lawsuits. There
Speaker 1: were eight people from Mali who were enslaved by cocoa
Speaker 1: plantations after being traffic from Mali sued Nestley, Cargill, Berry, Caliba,
Speaker 1: I don't know, some French shit mars Alam, Hershey's and
Speaker 1: Modeleas to try to get conversations from the companies by
Speaker 1: virtue of the fact that the companies sold products made
Speaker 1: by their child slave labor.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now there's also a separate lawsuit against slightly different companies,
Speaker 1: so a lot of the same company is slightly different
Speaker 1: that's using a different set of legal arguments. Both of
Speaker 1: the lawsuits have been thrown out, and I want to
Speaker 1: take a second to look at the reasoning here, both
Speaker 1: of which is are just amazing. So I think the
Speaker 1: most famous one is the Supreme courts eight to one
Speaker 1: decision that said, well, so, like, all this stuff happens,
Speaker 1: but it happened outside the US, so you can't sue
Speaker 1: companies for it here, which is an amazing piece of logic,
Speaker 1: which is just like, oh yeah, no, actually, like corporations,
Speaker 1: like American corporations could just go everywhere else and do crimes.
Speaker 1: And this is and the American legal system is specifically
Speaker 1: written in such a way that like, if an American
Speaker 1: corporation enslaves you in like the Ivory Coast, there's nothing
Speaker 1: you can do about it in the US. And then
Speaker 1: a judgment do you see throughout the other case because
Speaker 1: you know, their argument was, well, you can't prove that
Speaker 1: the companies knew you were being enslaved on those farms.
Speaker 1: There's no quote traceable connection between the people who enslaved
Speaker 1: you in the company, so there's nothing we can do.
Speaker 1: And the reason both these arguments work is the reason
Speaker 1: for the structure of the chocolate market, right, the reason
Speaker 1: cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast and all so Brazil
Speaker 1: can get away with this, you know, well, the reason
Speaker 1: that those plantations are in the Ivory Coast or Brazil
Speaker 1: or other places The reason they're happening there and not
Speaker 1: in the US is because these are places where you
Speaker 1: can get away with that level of exploitation in corporate
Speaker 1: violence that you know in the US would be a
Speaker 1: lot more difficult, and this shields them from legal liability. Furthermore,
Speaker 1: instead of just you know, jumping, instead of just running
Speaker 1: the cocoa plantations themselves, which these companies could easily do, right,
Speaker 1: this is a very very large trade. They could just
Speaker 1: sort of like they could invertially vertically and not even
Speaker 1: vertical integrate, they could just actually make chocolate, like they
Speaker 1: could just run the process, and they they very specifically
Speaker 1: choose not to do it. And the reason they choose
Speaker 1: not to do it, this isn't one hundred billion dollar industry, right,
Speaker 1: but instead they what they choose to do is to
Speaker 1: just buy cocoa from the chocolate market where all these
Speaker 1: sort of nebulous producers sell, which allows the chocolate companies
Speaker 1: to go, oh, well, these people don't work for us.
Speaker 1: We just buy chocolate from the market. How are we
Speaker 1: supposed to know which these plantations use slave labor?
Speaker 2: So it puts like a one degree of separation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well it's actually two degrees it's an additional degree
Speaker 1: of separation from the way something like Walmart works. Right,
Speaker 1: where Walmart has a bunch of independent contractors, this isn't
Speaker 1: even contractors. They're just buying finished products from things they're
Speaker 1: like they're completely unaffiliated with. And this gives them, like,
Speaker 1: it gives them like two degrees of legal separation, because
Speaker 1: it's not just that their contractors are doing something that
Speaker 1: they didn't know about, it's that they're just buying it, right,
Speaker 1: And this fucking sucks. And you know, since laws exist
Speaker 1: to protect the ruling class, judges and courts can just
Speaker 1: wave their hands and go, well, these companies definitely enslaved you,
Speaker 1: but we have no choice but to let them off
Speaker 1: completely scot free. So sorry about that. And I want
Speaker 1: to end today with something that has been running through
Speaker 1: my mind every since I fucking started researching this, which
Speaker 1: is that the worst onisie must pay for their times.
Speaker 1: The state has failed, the court has failed, the NGOs
Speaker 1: have failed, and if anything is ever going to fucking
Speaker 1: happen that forces these companies to be in any way,
Speaker 1: there there is to be like a single iota of
Speaker 1: justice for the fact that all of these companies have
Speaker 1: been fucking gorging themselves on the profits of slave labor.
Speaker 1: At all, we are going to do it or no
Speaker 1: one is, So congratulations you. The American worker is unfortunately
Speaker 1: incumbent on you to deal with these fucking corporations that
Speaker 1: have been destroying the entire world. So yeah, happy spooky
Speaker 1: week everyone.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is very scary. Yeah, well thank you for
Speaker 2: that lovely, uh depressing presentation. Uh via. I mean, I
Speaker 2: guess is there is there is there a sort of
Speaker 2: takeaway besides, there's no ethical conception to under capitalism.
Speaker 1: I mean, like, I mean, capitalism will never abolish slavery,
Speaker 1: and I don't think one.
Speaker 2: I know, there is one US state where they grow chocolate,
Speaker 2: which is Hawaii, which has its own problems of colonization.
Speaker 2: So even if you try to buy from a place
Speaker 2: that is you know, arguably has less chocolate slavery, it's
Speaker 2: generally better produced, it still is you're still implicating yourself
Speaker 2: in all of the problems relating to like the independence
Speaker 2: of that island and the US's colonization. So it's it's
Speaker 2: it's we're really just really just kind of trapped on
Speaker 2: all sides. Here is what it feels like. I mean,
Speaker 2: this is this Halloween chocolate problem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, and I think I think the way
Speaker 1: to think about this, right is that this this is
Speaker 1: an actual systemic issue, right, This is a systemic thing
Speaker 1: capitalism has been doing for about four hundred years, like CeNSE,
Speaker 1: its entire existence, and if you want to, if you
Speaker 1: want to end it, we have to. You have to. Actually,
Speaker 1: it's not it's not even enough to destroy these companies,
Speaker 1: right because even if you brought down every single one
Speaker 1: of these chocole companies, right, there would just be another
Speaker 1: round of chocolate companies. It will be doing exactly the
Speaker 1: same ship. So you have to you have to destroy
Speaker 1: the system of property by which these things are allowed
Speaker 1: to exist. And at that point maybe you can start
Speaker 1: on being able to eat food that isn't produced by
Speaker 1: slave labor.
Speaker 2: It turns out Willi Wogka was the villain the whole time.
Speaker 1: You know. I was trying to think about the amount
Speaker 1: of slave labor that we see from him versus the
Speaker 1: amount of slave Wonka. It's a it's I think Wonka
Speaker 1: is using more slave labor, but not by as much
Speaker 1: as it should be.
Speaker 2: I don't know, I don't know. It's it's it's hard
Speaker 2: to say, I I think it's pretty clear that Walka's
Speaker 2: use of slave labor is just an accurate representation of
Speaker 2: the real life industry.
Speaker 1: Yes, so yeah, go go, go enjoy your weekend, and then.
Speaker 2: You enjoy that new fucking twig Walka movie that looks
Speaker 2: I have to say dog shit.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, bad herod.
Speaker 2: Bad idea anyone's had since capitalism twin Kwonka. I'm sorry
Speaker 2: it doesn't slap I here out of ten anyway, Well, uh,
Speaker 2: tune in in the next few days for two more
Speaker 2: Spooky Week episodes for you. We only got three this
Speaker 2: week because there's a lot of other news happening, but yeah,
Speaker 2: we at least have two other Spooky Week episodes that
Speaker 2: I am about to finish working on, so stay tuned
Speaker 2: for that. Good Bye.
Speaker 1: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.