The Dark Side of Chocolate

On Halloween night, kids across the neighborhood can be heard howling with delight. Veins spiked with sugar and goody bags overflowing with Peanut Butter Cups and Hershey's bars propel tiny devils, ghouls and goblins from door to door.

Beyond the grinning jack-o-lanterns and just past the haunted house, the true horror of Halloween may be buried beneath the clever disguise of the seemingly sweet candy makers.  This July, major chocolate producers such as Mars, Hershey's and Nestle revealed that they were more about tricks than treats.

The truth behind the chocolate is anything but sweet. On the Ivory Coast of Africa, the origin of nearly half of the world's cocoa, hundreds of thousands of children work or are enslaved on cocoa farms. With poverty running rampant and average cocoa revenues ranging from $30-$108 per household member per year, producers have no choice but to utilize child labor for dangerous farming tasks. Some children, seeking to help their poor families, even end up as slaves on cocoa farms far from home. Slavery drags on and we are paying the slaveholder's wages.

In 2001, following an avalanche of negative publicity, the major chocolate companies agreed to a voluntary protocol to eliminate child labor on West African farms rather than face binding legislation from Congress that would have required them to label their products "slave free" -- a label none of the major chocolate companies would have qualified for.

But rather than accept responsibility for the low world cocoa prices which lay at the heart of the problem, the major chocolate manufacturers placed the blame on poor farmers for allowing their children to work, and adopted a plan which even if properly implemented would leave farmers without the income they needed to feed their families and keep their children in school. Under this plan -- to be monitored by the chocolate companies themselves -- consumers would also be denied any independent guarantee that child labor abuses were no longer occurring on West African farms.

When July rolled around, producers had failed to meet their deadline.  After four years passed without follow-through on a protocol that they had created, chocolate companies wanted four more years to reach a lesser goal. Instead of eliminating child labor on cocoa farms, they promised to reduce child labor by 50 percent in two West African countries by 2008, and these companies continue to deny not only responsibility for conditions on the farms which supply their cocoa, but to deny producers the only aspect of the production process they most certainly can control -- a fair price.  To put it simply, chocolate companies care more about profits than the fact that slaves are producing our chocolate.

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.