Reviews

Enslaved by sex and chocolate

Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade — and How We Can Fight

It. By David Batstone (Harper, 2007, 301 pp. $14.95 U.S. $18.95 Cdn.)

Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World’s Most Seductive

Sweet. By Carol Off (Random House Canada, 2006, 326 pp. $34.95 Cdn.)

Inscribed on David Livingstone’s tomb in London’s Westminster Abbey is the following plea against slavery: “All I can add in my solitude, is, may heaven’s rich blessing come down on every one, American, English or Turk, who will help heal this open sore of the world.”

The legendary missionary would probably be surprised to find

slavery still practiced more than a century after his death. He also would want David Batstone and Carol Off included in the reach of his blessing, for their books are compelling efforts to ameliorate the “open sore” of which he spoke.

Both authors are journalists. Batstone, besides being former executive editor of the evangelical activist magazine Sojourners, is also a business professor, ethicist and cofounder of Business 2.0 magazine. Carol Off is a Canadian broadcaster.

Their books are both gripping dramas about something most of us don’t want to think about — the modern trafficking in human slaves.

Batstone claims there are 27 million slaves around the world today, including 200,000 in the United States. These are kids and adults who loom rugs, harvest cocoa and mine diamonds. Some are child soldiers forced into service by renegade regimes.

Nowhere is slavery legal, but traffickers get away with it nonetheless, to the tune of 2 million slaves worldwide.

Many work unwillingly in the sex trade. UNICEF says that business alone comprises one million children around the world. According to World Vision, which Batstone says operates two of the most effective camps for freed slaves in northern Uganda, one fifth of men who travel to Cambodia do so for the purpose of sex.

He profiles several agencies (such as International Justice Mission) that work specifically with an abolitionist bent and try to free slaves.

One wouldn’t think slavery exists close to home but Batstone claims it does. In the U.S. most forced labor is in commercial sex (46 percent) and domestic service (27 percent) with smaller incidences in agriculture, sweatshops and restaurant/hotel work.

“Because forced labor is often hidden in unregulated work environments or where cheap labor is the norm, most Americans will walk by an incidence of slavery and pay no notice,” according to Batstone. One common tactic is for a U.S. “employer” of young women to claim that the parents back home have agreed to an employment contract.

Nowhere is slavery legal, but traffickers get away with it nonetheless. “If the laws that already appear on the books were enforced, the slave trade would end tomorrow,” Batstone says.

Carol Off traces the history of cocoa and North America’s favorite confection with special attention to its secret ingredient of child slavery, especially in Ivory Coast, a leading producer of beans. She tells harrowing tales of children aged 10 to 18, bought for as little as $40 each, some of whom when finally liberated “could no longer remember where they were from.”

Other examples are less dramatic, like the many thousands of non-enslaved children who work in West African cocoa fields with dangerous machetes and face prolonged chemical exposure.

While the picture she presents is grim, there are some bright spots. Efforts are underway among some key players in the chocolate supply chain to better regulate the industry and monitor conditions. And the recent swelling of support for organic and fair trade chocolate is cause for encouragement.

Meanwhile, some children’s rights activists have urged a “cranking down”of inflammatory “slavery” rhetoric to better achieve wider public and industry support. The goal, says one, is to “take the hazards out of the work and not the child out of work. There are circumstances in which children should be able to have jobs — and they want to have jobs.”

Both books carry an implicit message that economic development can play a pivotal role in alleviating the injustices they chronicle so passionately.

The main problem with chocolate’s unsavory track record, says Off, is “poverty among the primary producers. Farmers seek, and exploit, the cheapest forms of labour possible because of economic necessity. Time and sophistication equipped all the other players in the chocolate production chain to extract a satisfactory return for their investment of work and capital — everyone except the farmers on the bottom of the pile.”

Batstone, meanwhile, notes that microcredit programs are an important answer to the slavery problem, especially as it relates to the sex trade. “Abolitionists all over the world are launching microenterprises in an effort to create sustainable jobs for ex-slaves,” says Batstone. He quotes one of them as saying, “If we create new jobs and stimulate economic development, it will proportionately reduce the risks that girls must take that lead to trafficking.” — WK