How many times have you bitten into chocolate, savoring its sweet goodness? How often do you think about where it comes from? You may think chocolate has a secret ingredient that makes it taste so good. Well, it does, but it’s probably not what you think it is.
Chocolate comes from cocoa pods grown on plantations in the Ivory Coast and Ghana. These two countries together supply approximately seventy-five percent of the world’s cocoa. The cocoa pods are grown on trees 20-25 feet tall. There are about 40 almond-sized cocoa beans in a pod, and it takes about 400 beans to make a pound of chocolate. These pods are harvested by children as young as seven and as old as sixteen. They are paid very little if at all. About two thirds of the children are boys with one third being girls aged ten to twelve.
Most of the children forced to work on the cocoa plantations are smuggled from Mali, one of the world’s poorest countries. From there they are smuggled across the border to the Ivory Coast by a back road. Some are sold by their relatives to traffickers who take them to plantations and resell the children for a small price. Others are tricked into thinking there is good paying work available. Still others are abducted even in their own village.
These children work 80-100 hours a week. That’s about thirteen hours a day! During those long backbreaking hours, they are forced to work at a very fast pace for fear of being whipped. First, they must climb the cocoa trees and cut the cocoa pods off the tree using a machete. Then they strike the pod with the machete and use the tip of the large knife to pry open the pod. Every time they cut open the pod with the machete, there is a dangerous and quite likely potential of being injured. An alarming number of children have scars on their hands, arms, legs, or shoulders from the machete. Once they have the pods open, they scoop out the beans, lay them out, and cover them to ferment. Then, they uncover them and leave them in the sun. Once they are dry, they put them in large burlap bags and haul them through the forest to a spot designated by the plantation owner. “Some of the bags were taller than me. It took two people to put the bag on my head. And when you didn’t hurry, you were beaten,” says Aly Diabate, former cocoa slave (http://www.foodispower.org/slavery_chocolate.php). The children are also beaten for trying to escape. As if the danger of getting severely injured by the machete and getting whipped are not enough, the children are directly exposed to agricultural chemicals. To protect the pods from an excessive amount of bugs, children as young as twelve spray the pods with hazardous chemicals without protective equipment.
At the end of a long day, the children get to look forward to sleeping on wooden planks in small windowless buildings out on the plantation. In some cases they are locked in at night to prevent running away. During the day, they are allowed a small portion of corn paste and bananas or whatever food is cheap for the farmer.
According to the International Labour Organization, these children should be allowed to go to school. By not allowing them to get a proper education, they are depriving them of their rights and their future. If they ever get out from under the grasp of these plantation owners, they have little hope of being anything but poor.
Technically, this is all illegal. In 2001, the heads of eight major chocolate companies (including Hershey, Mars, and Nestlé) signed a protocol, known as the Harkin-Engel Protocol, stating that by July 2005 they would not be involved in any of the worst forms of child labor. By the deadline, the chocolate companies had made little progress. So, they agreed to an extension. Now, in 2013, the protocol requirements have still not been met. Just last year, Miki Mistrati maker of the documentary, The Dark Side of Chocolate, “claimed the protocol is just ‘a document and politics’ because there has been no progress. He thinks that the same issues will be present in five years and that changes will not come through the protocol, but instead from consumers who demand change.”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harkin-Engel_Protocol) In 2011, research showed that there were still 1.8 million children working on cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast and Ghana. “Chris Bayer, a Tulane University researcher, spent five years in the Ivory Coast and Ghana monitoring the protocol’s plan and studying the scope of the problem. ‘Unfortunately, over the last ten years we have seen very little implementation of the actual commitments,’ he said. ‘The industry did not live up to the Harkin-Engel protocol. The issues are systemic. Children are still working.’” (http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/19/the-human-cost-of-chocolate/)
Most of these children have never even tasted the chocolate they work so hard to produce. “Drissa, a recently freed slave who had never even tasted chocolate, was asked what he would tell the people who eat chocolate made from slave labor. He replied that the people enjoyed something that he had suffered to make, adding: ‘When people eat chocolate they are eating my flesh.’” (http://www.foodispower.org/slavery_chocolate.php)
When a secret ingredient is added to something, it changes it; for better or for worse. When you eat an unethically produced bar of chocolate, you are eating chocolate with a bad secret ingredient: child slave labor.
So what are you going to do? You may think that you are just one person; not capable of doing much to stop this atrocious treatment of children. In 1807 William Wilberforce helped to abolish slavery in Britain. He was one man. Every time you eat a bar of slave trade chocolate, you are supporting slavery of children. We need to fight against this great evil. Even if it costs us more. Because no bar of chocolate is worth ruining a child’s life.
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