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Europe, by contrast, consumes almost half of the world’s chocolate.

Global Gap Sadly, the plight of cocoa farmers is not unusual. Workers on banana plantations in Latin America are often paid as little as $1 a day. They work fourteen-hour shifts and are routinely exposed to dangerous chemical pesticides and fer- tilizers. Textile workers in Bangladesh are paid $68 a month in sweatshops with poor working conditions. Their counterparts in Ethiopian garment factories fare even worse, earning wages as low as $35 a month. And even though coffee is one of the world’s most valuable commodi- ties, the majority of the world’s 25 million coffee farmers earn less than $3 a day—roughly the price of one latte. Overall, some 2.7 billion

people live on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank. That comes to about 40 percent of the world’s total population. One billion of the world’s citizens live in slums. Some 800 million are malnourished. More than twenty thousand children die

Did You Know?

According to a 2000 US State Department report, fifteen thou- sand children, aged nine to twelve, were sold into forced labor on con- ventional cotton, coffee, and cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast.

every day from poverty-related causes. The majority of the world’s poor are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, Central and Latin America, and large parts of Asia. These regions are sometimes referred to as

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Global Inequalities and the Fair Trade Movement