Yes, two great tastes that taste great together. However, there is quite probably a much less
great, if not universally repugnant taste in that and many other chocolate
treats. That taste is child slave labor.
A little over ten years ago, Raghavan and Chatterjee
reported in Knight Ridder Newspapers on the story of two boys trafficked from Mali to
work on a cocoa farm in the Ivory Coast.
A US State Department report on human rights a year prior to this story stated
that as many as 15,000 children between the ages of 9 and 12 had been sold into
slavery to work on farms in the northern Ivory Coast. At the time, the Ivory Coast supplied 43% of the
worldwide production of cocoa beans used to make chocolate. Today, that number approaches 50%. Raghavan and Chatterjee
detailed how the boys were lured from their families by the promise of $20 a
month and a bicycle. When the boys
reached the farm, they received no money and no bicycles. They were locked in shacks at night with only
baseball-sized air holes in the walls.
They were beaten with tree branches and, ironically, bicycle chains if
they worked too slowly, dropped bags of beans, or tried to run away.
At first “Big Chocolate” said they were not aware of these
types of abuses. Then they said they had
no way to control slave-harvested cocoa beans from getting mixed with
non-slave-harvested ones. In 2001 the
Harkin-Engel Protocol was signed by the US Congress to eliminate child
and/or slave labor from the production of chocolate. To date “Big Chocolate” won’t name their suppliers and have certified only small fractions of their products as being free from ingredients derived from child slave labor.
A decade has passed and these abuses are still happening. So what can we do?
- Click the links in this post and learn about this issue. You could also order an informational video at http://www.thedarksideofchocolate.org/
- Let Big Chocolate: Archer Daniels Midland, Barry Callebaut, Cargill, Nestle, and Hershey know where you stand. Hershey’s makes this easier: Hershey’s Corporate Social Responsibility –Survey
- Write your representatives in Congress and voice your opinion. They won’t act unless they start hearing from us.
- Buy Fair Trade Certified chocolate.
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