Chocolate And Slavery: How Your Child’s Christmas Candy
Relies On Child Slaves
By Kurtis Bright
How Companies Like Nestle, Mars and Hershey Quietly Profit From Child Slavery
Christmas is of course a time for gift-giving, cookies, and hot chocolate.
But while western parents get to shower their children with
presents and candy for a day, there are children halfway around the world who
labor in conditions of modern slavery to provide the chocolate for those treats.
Toiling in cocoa groves in the brutal heat of the Ivory
Coast, these children live very different lives from those of their western
counterparts, subject to beatings and withheld food, with no hope of release.
And the sad fact is that many major chocolate producers
quietly take advantage of this system of modern slavery, maximizing profits and
taking no responsibility for the misery they help to foster.
A recent lawsuit names some of the biggest companies in the
chocolate industry, including Mars, Nestlé, and Hershey, alleging that their
participation in child slavery is ongoing in Ghana and Ivory Coast, as it has
been for decades.
Predictably, the companies and nations named in the lawsuit
continue to drag their feet when it comes to dealing with the horrors and
injustice of the situation. The latest agreement has set a laughable goal of
2020 for ending childhood slavery in the cocoa fields.
So childhood slavery, beatings and misery should be
tolerated for another FOUR YEARS? In order to not disrupt a corrupt system that
all parties claim to agree is unacceptable? This is a shameful delay of the end of something
that should be wiped out immediately, by force if need be.
For a more direct view of the horrors these children routinely
undergo, check out a powerful film,
“Slavery: A Global Investigation.” There is a tremendously moving section on the
child slaves of the cocoa fields of West Africa in which the filmmakers
illustrate how these children, often as young as ten years old, are routinely
beaten with belts, fists and sticks, and forced to work 80 to 100 hours a
week--all to benefit the powerful stockholders of major chocolate companies.
“The beatings were a part of my life,” explained freed slave
Aly Diabate. “Anytime they loaded you with bags [of cocoa beans] and you fell
while carrying them, nobody helped you. Instead they beat you and beat you
until you picked it up again.”
And the problem is endemic to the industry. Child slavery is
part and parcel of the production of chocolate, and it taints all the candy companies
you have heard of.
“At the moment, no major chocolate company can guarantee
their cocoa supply is not tainted by child labor,” said Elizabeth Jardim of
non-profit Green America, a group that promotes ethical consumer choices.
“However, most have launched sustainability programs that attempt to address child
labor in a variety of ways, largely thanks to consumer pressure.”
Until the major chocolate companies feel some pain from
consumers who are concerned not only with their own children, but also with the
children whose lives are stolen in order to make their sweets this will never
change, not even in the far-off 2020 goal set by the companies and nations
involved.
Virtually all chocolate sourced from Africa is likely to be
tainted by child slave labor. By applying pressure to the big chocolate
manufacturers, we can change this sad fact. At the very least we can choose not
to support slavers, like Nestlé, Mars and Hershey.
Please check out this list of chocolate
manufacturers that the Food Empowerment Project recommends as free of child
labor.
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