Big Chocolate's Child Slavery Addiction [View All]

Big Chocolate's Child Slavery Addiction
This Halloween, try to ensure that your chocolate isn't tainted.
by Andrew Korfhage

Sorry to scare you, but on Halloween much of the chocolate Americans will hand out to trick-or-treaters will be tainted by the labor of enslaved children.

Hershey's, Nestlé, and the other big chocolate companies know this. They promised nearly a decade ago to set up a system to certify that no producers in their supply chains use child labor. They gave themselves a July 2005 deadline for that, which came and went without meaningful action. A second voluntary deadline sailed by as well in 2008. There's a new deadline for voluntary action at the end of this year. Don't hold your breath.



Few Americans had heard of this problem before reporters Sudarsan Raghavan and Sumana Chatterjee exposed the scandalous conditions under which most U.S. chocolate is made, in the summer of 2001. In one of their articles, a slave described his 13-hour workdays on the 494-acre plantation as brutal, filled with harsh physical labor, punctuated by beatings, and ending with a night of fitful sleep on a wooden plank in a locked room with other slaves.

"The beatings were a part of my life," said the boy who was sold into slavery at not yet 12 years old. "Anytime they loaded you with bags and you fell while you were carrying them, nobody helped you. Instead, they beat you and beat you until you picked it up again."

The reports shocked some members of Congress into action. That fall, Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) and Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) prepared bills to require U.S. chocolate companies--by force of law--to certify their products as slave-free. Engel's bill passed the House, but before Harkin's bill could pass the Senate, the chocolate industry had announced a voluntary four-year plan to clean up its own supply chains, without legislation.

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Meanwhile evidence that child slavery still bedevils the chocolate industry isn't hard to find. For example, in late September, a research team from Tulane University (specifically charged by Congress with oversight of the voluntary supply-chain efforts) reported that "the industry is still far from achieving its target…by the end of 2010…and the majority of children exposed to the worst forms of child labor remain unreached."

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All the while, the biggest chocolate companies claim that because they don't own the cocoa plantations outright, cleaning up their supply chains is too hard. But some of them aren't even trying. The biggest cocoa company in the country, Hershey's--even after nine years to get started--has no certification system in place whatsoever to ensure that its cocoa isn't tainted by labor rights abuses.

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The people who produce the raw materials for our chocolate treats deserve fair wages and safe working conditions. African children shouldn't have to suffer unspeakable horrors so that our children can have a happy Halloween.



http://www.otherwords.org/articles/big_chocolates_child_slavery_addiction



Here is the trailer for the just-released documentary The Dark Side of Chocolate, where filmmakers Miki Mistrati and U. Roberto Romano go undercover and expose child slavery in the cocoa supply chain from the inside.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y882AajKo1s


Approximately 286,000 children between the ages of nine and twelve have been reported to work on cocoa farms on the Ivory Coast alone with as many as 12,000 likely to have arrived in their situation as a result of child trafficking. These children are often at risk of injury from machetes and exposure to harmful pesticides. With world cocoa prices so low, many farmers maintain their labor force through trafficking; West African parents living in poverty often sell their kids to cocoa farmers for $50-$100 in hopes that the children will make some money on their own.


Sadly, although these children work 80 to 100 hours per week, children working on cocoa farms frequently make little or no money and are regularly beaten, starved, and exhausted. Most of these children will never even taste the final product that results from their suffering.



How can consumers tell whether or not the products they consume are produced by slaves? The $13 billion dollar chocolate industry is dominated by two firms: Hershey's and M&M's/Mars. Both of these companies use mostly Ivory Coast cocoa; their products are almost certainly produced partly by slaves.

Although these companies have publicly condemned and expressed outrage at the use of child slavery, they admit their ongoing purchase of Ivory Coast cocoa.
Another major player in the cocoa industry is Nestle. Nestle recently made waves in the U.K. by introducing the first line of fair trade coffee from a major roaster in that country. But their continued refusal to extend a fair price to cocoa farmers and their children underlines the shallowness of their commitment.

As one of the largest chocolate manufacturers in the world and the third largest buyer of cocoa from the Ivory Coast, Nestle bears responsible for eliminating slave and child labor from the chocolate production processes. With processing, storage and export facilities throughout the Ivory Coast, Nestle is well aware of the tragically unjust labor practices taking place on the farms with which it continues to do business. The enormity of Nestle's profits (over $65 billion in annual sales) and its leveraged position in the food industry underline the company's culpability and capability to ensure a fair wage and fair labor practices.


Mars, Hershey's and Nestle argue that it would be impossible for them to control the labor practices of their suppliers, but a number of other large corporations have exemplified this possibility. These companies include Clif Bar, Cloud Nine, Dagoba Organic Chocolate, Denman Island Chocolate, Divine, Gardners Candies, Green and Black's, Kailua Candy Company, Koppers Chocolate, L.A. Burdick Chocolates, Montezuma's Chocolates, Newman's Own Organics, Omanhene Cocoa Bean Company, Rapunzel Pure Organics and The Endangered Species Chocolate Company.

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http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12754%22





* An estimated 218 million children are involved in work around the world.

* 126 million work under the worst forms of child labour.

* More than one million children are employed in the cocoa farming sector in West Africa.

* Between 200,000 and 800,000 children under the age of 18 are trafficked each year in West Africa alone.

More information at http://www.chocolatefilm.net/