Halloween for my family is a celebration of playful childhood. Wearing fanciful costumes, visiting and being visited by loving friends and eating chocolate are all embraced.

Now, chocolate that is tainted by slavery and oppressive labor conditions has to go, for I have studied 1991 BBC documentary which first broght this matter to public attention, the Knight-Ridder series and much more.

The memory of my sons as delighted firemen, happy in clown suits with honker noses so much more is not marred by today's knowledge.

It is today that I know.

It is today that both the secular ethics and faith require of me one quietly raised voice and the action I can bring to bear against the slavery, near-slavery, below-poverty wages and unsafe conditions.

Matters have apparently changed very little in the half decade since Mali's Save the Children Fund director, Salia Kante, spoke to BBC of child chocolate workers:

"People who are drinking cocoa or coffee are drinking their blood.It is the blood of young children carrying 6kg of cocoa sacks so heavy that they have wounds all over their shoulders. It's really pitiful to see."

Earlier this year in The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Save the Children Canada CEO David Morely wrote:

But still, not much has changed for most children working in the cocoa fields. Recent visits by Save the Canada staff to cocoa farms in Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean found low bean prices, low wages, demanding and hazardous work, few heath and education services. We have given these findings to industry leaders with our offer to work with them to change child labour practices in growing and harvesting of cocoa.

As a first, small step, the only chocolate and coffee I'm buying has the fair trade label.

That will not stop the traffic of kidnapped children into slavery on the West African cocoa farms, and the employment at sub-poverty wages under what in this country would be criminal conditions of a great many others.

Changing those conditions is a complex matter.

Being choosy about my chocolate and coffee is simply an honest start, while I decide how this one Southern man can best address the politics of the issue.