Scare trade: Halloween candy you can feel good about

By Claire Thompson
Tuesday, October 25, 2011

For most of us, Halloween has a strong association with candy. When you're little, you get to dress up and run around your neighborhood collecting it for free. When you're a bit older, you get to dress up, get drunk, and buy it steeply discounted on Nov. 1. And when you're a parent, you get to supervise kids on their candy-collecting mission, and sneak some after bedtime. Along with all this candy is the sense that, however old you get, Halloween signals a brief return to innocence.

"They've long claimed that certification transparency is not possible, or [they] can't verify what's happening on the ground," says Evans. "But I think what Equal Exchange and other fair trade companies have shown is that you can [verify it]."
Equal Exchange sources organic cacao beans from small-scale family farming cooperatives in Latin America. And, while Evans acknowledged that it would require a transition period for a large chocolate company to change its practices, she pointed out that there's currently an abundance of farmers with fair-trade ingredients to sell.
So what can you do to spread the word about Big Chocolate's dirty secret? Boycotting Halloween would be a major buzzkill -- and might actually hurt more than it would help. "It's definitely a heavy, scary topic that is not as much fun to talk about for a product that's seen as such a source of joy," Evans said. That's why Equal Exchange has teamed up with human rights organization Global Exchange to promote the fifth annual Reverse Trick-or-Treating campaign, which invites families to trick-or-treat as usual, but hand back small fair-trade chocolates in exchange for their loot -- a simple public awareness campaign with added power because the message comes from children whose peers on the other side of the world are enduring a real-life hardship.
"It's a creative way to approach a big, complex, and depressing problem," adds Evans.  
If you really can't bring yourself to spring for fancy chocolate (or maybe you're one of those rare weirdos who doesn't actually like chocolate), you can at least go visit their site and download cards and flyers instead.

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