Korean Job Discussion Forums

[julian_w]

Fair trade coffee is readily available in stores in all cities and larger towns in Korea.

More information available here.

Chocolate, soccer balls (a.k.a. 'footballs'), clothing, and various other products are also available online. See the link above for more details.

[Ethan Allen Hawley]

That's a fairly good website. It looks like there were a few people who went along on Saturday. Did anyone here go to it? What was it like?

[julian_w]

Hey Ethan

It was an interesting crowd in that there were a lot of new faces there. There were most of the usual suspects who go religiously to practise their English of course, but both in terms of locals (Korean) and foreigners there were a many I'd not seen nor met before, and quite a few I'd not seen for a while.

Also interesting about the crowd was that there were a few younger Koreans there. I'd only seen one kid at one of these talks before. There were definately a few that day, and they seemed to be following what was said, too. That was cool. I would have liked to have caught up with them after and found out if they were only there for the chocolate or the raffle, or if they really understood what it was all about.

Especially with regard chocolate and kids. This is all another aspect of fair trade versus free trade I've only discovered very recently myself, and could and should have gone more into there, cos I have the feeling Korea is being used as a bit of a dumping ground for unethically made chocolate these days.

Anyway, last Saturday itself was pretty good.

[Ethan Allen Hawley]

Wow that's pretty interesting about the chocolate. I didn't know that before. One commentator says maybe up to 40% of all typical commercial chocolate could be produced with the help of child slave labor. I did some looking on wiki.org and found this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_cocoa#cite_note-Payson-15

and this
http://www.wikinfo.org/index.php/Chocolate_and_slavery

They both have lots of studies and information from all around. But I wonder where Korean company's cacao comes from, I mean like Lotte, are Ghana bars cacao actually from Ghana where there seems to be a bit of slavery or from the Ivory Coast where there is most of it? Or do they just get the cacao from one of the big nasty companies that don't care about it all anyway, like Nestle? I can't read the Korean. Can anyone help on this?

[Ethan Allen Hawley]

Yeah that statistic is interesting because the Ivory Coast is by far the largest single producer of cacao, and it amounts to about 40% of the world's total output of it.

Ghana is next, closely followed by Indonesia, but according to the studies and media reports the child slavery all happens in west Africa.

I remember seeing some of those new high percentage chocolate bars in HomePlus and Emart and at least one of them was named after the Ivory Coast, much as Ghana is named after Ghana.

All that really means is that the Korean market is adept at glorifying and marketing that region and so the supermarket aisles here in Korea are most likely saturated with all the produce that those companies can't move in western markets so readily because consumers there are a lot more aware of the issues.

It's interesting though that fair trade is quite a big deal in Japan, and Lotte is a Japanese owned company (as far as I read somewhere, although I think I heard it was owned by a Korean who lived in Japan or something), but there will be no corporate behavioural differences either there or here without us demanding them (and voting with our money).

[Ethan Allen Hawley]