Have you ever thought about where chocolate comes from? Well, even though chocolate tastes good, the story isn't so sweet. Chocolate comes from the dried beans of the cocoa tree and one of the places where this tree grows is Bolivia. Cocoa trees need about 80 inches of rain per year. A cocoa tree grows near the equator and grows between 50-200 feet tall.
Many cocoa farmers are very poor and only get about $.25 per pound of cocoa. Because families are so poor, many children have to work to help support their families. Even worse, some children have to work as slaves on these farms. These children support their families by working in fields all day long instead of going to school. Some cocoa farmers don't care about the land and hurt the rainforest by cutting down trees or using chemicals on plants to grow the cocoa.
But there is something that we can do to help! We can buy fair-trade chocolate. When we buy fair-trade chocolate, we help to pay a fair price for the farmer's hard work.
We wrote lots of letters to companies asking them to sell their chocolate fair-trade. We hope it will help!
Keep walking, Stoneleigh.
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