This Valentine's Day, Show Her How Much You Care....

....by giving her chocolate and roses, purchased from child labor plantations in South America and West Africa.

From a recent op-ed in the Fresno Bee:
"Millions of pounds of cocoa come into our country from Central and South America and Africa. Farmers are paid pennies for crops. Children are forced to work the cocoa plantations instead of going to school. Families eke out a meager existence while middlemen and candy companies reap enormous profits. This sweet delight comes at the expense of growers and child laborers.

Americans buy more than 150 million roses each year. Many of these roses come from huge rose plantations in Central and South America and now China. These plantations pay very low wages and often expose their workers to dangerous chemicals such as pesticides, herbicides and fungicides."

And this from human-rights organization Global Exchange:
"The Harkin-Engel Protocol was prompted by media exposés in 2001 by Knight Ridder and others that made public the existence of child slavery on Ivory Coast cocoa farms, and created an avalanche of negative publicity and consumer demands for answers and solutions. Two members of the U.S. Congress, Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Representative Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), took up the issue by adding a rider to an agricultural bill proposing a federal system to certify and label chocolate products as "slave free." The measure passed the House of Representatives and created a potential disaster for Mars, Hershey's, Nestle and other major chocolate manufacturers. To avoid legislation that would have forced chocolate companies to label their products with "no slave labor" labels (for which many major chocolate manufacturers wouldn't qualify), the industry agreed to a voluntary protocol to end abusive and forced child labor on cocoa farms by 2005. According to the protocol, the chocolate industry was to develop and implement credible, mutually acceptable, voluntary, industry wide standards of public certification, which would take effect by July 1, 2005. Despite this commitment, there has been almost no progress in the design and implementation of a monitoring or certification program."

Be an informed consumer, know what you're buying. Demand fair-trade products.

Unless, you're like me and are simply too poor to live up to your noble ideals (or if you don't have the time to run from place to place looking for "slave-free" chocolate or flowers today because you put off buying anything until the last minute and you know your girlfriend won't buy your humanitarian rationalizing).
In that case, buy whatever is most convenient and feel free to revel in the contradiction.