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Valentine’s Day gifts leave a bitter taste
Financial Times
February 14, 2008
By Harvey Morris
Labour rights campaigners will take some of the romance out of Valentine’s Day on Thursday by warning lovers that their traditional gifts of flowers and chocolates are often bought at an intolerable cost to those who produce them.
At a briefing hosted by the United Nations, they plan to highlight the suffering of farm labourers in Africa and Latin America, some of whom work in near slave conditions to supply goods to a predominantly western market.
“Valentine’s Day gifts are about caring and it is important that the companies that supply chocolates and cut flowers know that their customers also care about the workers who are at the end of the supply chain,” said Stephen Pursey, director of policy integration at the International Labour Organization, which has a speaker at Thursday’s session in New York.
Lobby groups say it is not merely a matter of poor working conditions. In Ivory Coast, the world’s largest producer of cocoa, the raw material for chocolate, they say the battle to control the $1.4bn (€960m, £700m) a year industry has fuelled a conflict between the government and rebel groups.
Up to a quarter of Ivorians work in the cocoa industry. Many are child labourers and children have also been recruited into the opposing armies.
The International Labour Rights Forum, a lobbying group, said this month that the world’s leading chocolate companies, including Nestle, M&M/Mars and Hershey, had failed to meet a promised 2005 deadline to provide consumers with a “child labour-free chocolate” certification programme and now faced a new agreed deadline of July 2008.
When it comes to cut flowers, the focus is on Colombia and Ecuador, which supply the US market with 90 per cent of its roses and carnations – the favoured choices for Valentine’s Day.
“A lot of the workers in those countries are women,” said Nora Ferm of the ILRF’s Fairness in Flowers campaign. “They suffer sexual harassment, as well as health problems from the toxic pesticides used,” Ms Ferm, who will address Thursday’s UN meeting, said.
Ethical consumers at least have a greater choice than in the past. Fair trade flowers have now joined fair trade coffee in some shops while companies such as Divine Chocolate, part-owned by cocoa farmers in Ghana, guarantee that their goods are produced under humane conditions.
More affluent gift-givers were also warned to exercise caution if they plan to buy diamonds for their loved ones.
Alex Yearsley of Global Witness, the organisation that exposed the scandal of “blood” diamonds that fuelled conflicts in west Africa, said conditions in some diamond mines were still appalling.
Mr Yearsley said the contribution of the diamond industry to armed conflict had dramatically fallen since the introduction of the certification programme known as the Kimberley process. However, “there are massive problems in Congo and there is widespread corruption in countries such as Angola”.
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