Everybody loves chocolate! Yet the traditional production of  chocolate is an environmentally destructive process that exploits workers, small farmers and ultimately destroys the rainforest that sustains the people.

The Amazon Rainforest has often been called the "lungs of our planet" because it provides the essential environmental world service of continuously recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen. More than 20 percent of the world’s oxygen is produced in the Amazon Rainforest, so the cutting of the rainforests for timber and the resulting full-sun cacao plantations are inhibiting the planet’s ability to combat global warming.

Rainforests are being destroyed at the rate of 78 million acres of life-giving trees burned or cut each year. That’s an appalling 150 acres a minute, 200,000 acres a day. Yet by buying fair traded, shade grown organic chocolate (and other products), you can be part of the solution by encouraging subsistence rainforest farmers to keep their trees alive for future years of crops, for future generations and to preserve the “lungs of the planet.”

Rainforests once covered 14% of the earth's land surface; now they cover a mere 6% and experts estimate that the last remaining rainforests could be consumed in less than 40 years.

By buying fair trade chocolates, you’ll be supporting rainforest growers and workers, slowing the destruction of the Amazon Rainforest  and helping ensure it will be here for our children and their children.

Learn more about preserving the rainforest at: www.rain-tree.com or www.rainforestpreservation.org. You can help preserve the diminishing forestland by visiting www.therainforestsite.com, a partner of The Nature Conservancy. Advertisers on the site donate for each click, so a daily free click takes you a few seconds and can really make a difference. So far, 92 million acres of rainforest land in the U.S., Canada, Latin America and the Pacific have been preserved through the program.

 
Garden of Life is helping, too, through its Rainforest Cacao™ chocolates:

• We buy freshly picked cacao beans at fair trade prices from small family farms in the Ecuadorian Amazon. These shade- grown cacao beans are tended by farmers who use small scale, low impact agricultural techniques, combating environmental damage from large-scale, full-sun, chemical-intensive bulk cocoa operations.
• The beans are carefully fermented, sun dried, slowly roasted, cracked and minimally sweetened with sugar cane syrup to preserve the natural antioxidant flavonoids, including the flavonols that support healthy cholesterol levels and microcirculation.
• Traditionally, high quality cocoa has been grown under the rainforest canopy, but for the past 90 years Ecuador’s Amazon region has been decimated by large scale farming of inferior hybrid beans in deforested full-sun fields.
• Buying Garden of Life Rainforest Cacao™ products is a healthy way to help preserve sustainable economies in the fragile Ecuadorian Amazon ecosystem by encouraging the return of traditional cacao farming and providing a sustainable economy for the people of the Amazon region.
• For every purchase of Garden of Life Rainforest Cacao™ products, the company donates a portion of the proceeds to support the FUNEDESIN foundation’s education, health and rainforest conservation programs. Learn more at www.funedesin.org.