I'm not just talking about a city dominated and controlled by Black folks. More emphasis on the "chocolate" part. Ray Nagin had the right idea, but there is another area of concern he never mentioned.
More than 50% of the world's cocoa beans are produced in West Africa. Ghana and the Ivory Coast to be exact.
According to the European Fair Trade Association, farmers get barely 5 percent of the profit from chocolate, whereas trading organizations and the chocolate industry receive about 70 percent. This means that producers get only 5 cents from every dollar spent on chocolate, while the companies get 70 cents - 14 times more!
http://wheatonfairtrade.wordpress.com/facts-about-fair-trade-and-the-cocoa-industry/
America is the world’s largest chocolate consumer.
It is estimated that America spends $13 billion a year on chocolate.
http://www.chicagofairtrade.org/abo...y-unfulfilled-promises-of-the-cocoa-industry/
The fact that child slaves are used in the harvesting of cocoa beans in Cote D'Ivoire, the world's major supplier of cocoa, is undisputed. The US State Department estimates that there are approximately 15,000 children working on cocoa, coffee, and cotton farms in the Cote D'Ivoire. In June 2001, the ILO also reported that trafficked child labor was used in cocoa production in West Africa. Media reports have unveiled stories about boys tricked or sold into slavery, some as young as nine years old, to work on cocoa plantations in Cote d'Ivoire. ILRF has verified these reports through our own independent investigations conducted in 2002 and 2003, and has interviewed children who have escaped from the cocoa plantations.
The cocoa bean industry is a BILLION dollar business. Meanwhile...back on the other plantation.
Let's connect the dots here. What would happen if Africans in America demanded a cease and desist of West Africa's cocoa bean slavery? And instead worked hard along with native Africans to create a better cocoa bean economy that instead of raping Africans and making Europeans richer, it would empower the African global nation? Pipe dream?
P.S. Cocoa beans are the health cure for just about everything that Africans in America die from...minus the Police.
