Communities in Nigeria, Papua New Guinea and Brazil, are being robbed of their sustainability by the practices of large scale Soap, Toilet Paper and Tyre manufacturers:

In the case of Nigeria, in 2007, the French tire maker Michelin came in to the Iguóbazuwa Forest Reserve, a biologically diverse region supplying food for around 20,000 people. Michelin bulldozed the forest and local farm lands to convert them into rubber plantations. Women living there lost their subsistence farms and the local forest which provided medicinal herbs and plants.

~ Sustainablog

At last dreams are coming true! The Big Boys are joining in the fun. Cadbury’s Dairy Milk is becoming Fairly Traded:

100 years ago William Cadbury chose beans from Ghana. A year ago we founded the Cadbury Cocoa Partnership. And from Autumn 2009 Cadbury Dairy Milk will be Fairtrade certified. Welcome aboard.

Click here for more (Thanks, @nomesbaker)

A Global Report on Trafficking in Persons was released on the 12th February. It shows that many countries are in denial about the issue, and that without better information sharing there will be little success in fighting it.

Worldwide, almost 20% of all trafficking victims are children. However, in some parts of Africa and the Mekong region, children are the majority (up to 100% in parts of West Africa).

(photo © Mitchell Kanashkevich)

An article in The Times about the importance of a change of worldview to the transformation of Africa:

Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers – in some ways less so – but more open.

(Thanks Ashley & Rosemary)

Recently I’ve been reading ‘A Crime So Monstrous‘ by E. Benjamin Skinner. It’s a captivating look into the nature of the modern slave trade (AKA Human Trafficking) around the world.

Skinner’s research is very practical. He travels to places under cover, arranges to meet with a trafficker, and organizes to buy a person. During the book he also meets with various politicians and NGO staff, as well as parents whose children have been abducted.

Some of the things that Skinner discovers as he travels are shocking, especially where concerned with organizations who are perceived to be doing good. He notes that in southern Sudan, where research has shown there are around 11,000 people missing due to slavery, there is a Christian organization called Christian Solidarity International (CSI) who claim to have freed more than 80,000 slaves. It seems that the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (who are fighting for freedom from the North) have been using CSI’s ‘redemption’ process as a means to fund their troops through the use of fake slaves.

While in Haiti he comments:

Locals say that the main contribution of the peacekeepers to Haiti’s economy comes via the brothels

In other words those we expect to fulfill roles of integrity: keeping peace, dealing with injustice, tackling poverty; are actually propagating the problem.

Reading this convinces me that we have to do something to fight this injustice. There is nothing noble about celebrating the life of abolitionists like William Wilberforce without addressing the fact that today there are more people in slavery than at any other moment in history.