Of Chocolate and the Whip

There I was, blissfully clicking around the Internet and reading up on local sources of super-fancy chocolate because, you know, yum, when I clicked onto this:

http://www.tcho.com/tcho-is/no-slavery

and now, stomach fully turned, I’ve sworn off eating chocolate
that doesn’t identify its origins. To summarize, 37% of the world’s
chocolate comes from the Ivory Coast, where according to the US Department of State over 100,000 child slaves (not “just” wage or contract slaves, actual forced-labor kidnapees) are working on the cocoa farms. International Labor Organizations projections are lower, but add the delightful statistic that “30% of children under age 15 in sub-Saharan Africa engage in child labor, mostly in agricultural activities including cocoa farming,” and that around 200,000 children are working the Ivorian cocoa farms in total.

The big chocolate producers — you know, the ones whose tempting treats line the checkout stands of North America and Europe — all buy chocolate as a bulk commodity, with the Ivorian stuff mixed in, per an Oxfam report. This means that if you impulse-buy a bar to tide you over until you get home with your dinner, or any chocolate product that doesn’t identify its origins, it is safe to assume that a portion of each bite was brought to you buy the hands of a young African slave, toiling in conditions worse than those of the American Antebellum cotton plantations. If you luck out and chance upon a bar for which this isn’t literally true, the economic effect of buying that brand is the same.

Since I started reading up on this, I’ve been looking into what sorts of actions different groups are taking to fight this specific slave industry. While there are some good groups working to fight global slavery in general, inclusive of this form, I have not yet found anyone working the US corporate angle. With all the good press Wal-Mart has been getting about drawing lines in the sand with their Chinese suppliers on environmental issues, not to mention the popularity of Fair Trade labeled coffee and yes even chocolate, this just might be the right time to start pushing on companies like Hershey’s, Nestle, and Cadbury’s to reassure the world that their confections are not produced in any part by child slavery.

My contact at Corporate Accountability International tells me that this doesn’t fit their focus well enough (I am a big fan, regardless, of what they do). My contacts at other orgs are, sadly, non-existent. If any of my readers has suggestions about who I might do well to contact, they will be appreciated; meanwhile, my research will continue.

There are many things in this world that are Not OK, and to be sure there are far too many to count. That said, I can think of few things more despicable than child slavery.

Just put the damn Crunch bar down.

UPDATE: Hershey’s is doing some good work on this already. Kudos to them. The International Labor Rights Fund is currently going after ADM, Cargill, and Nestle over Malian slaves kidnapped by Ivorian cocoa farmers with a lawsuit.

UPDATE 2: Many of the big corporations that produce and sell chocolate worldwide, including Nestle’s and Cadbury’s, signed onto the International Cocoa Initiative in 2002, which was created in part to fulfill the goals of a “no child slavery” label as put forward in the Harkin-Engel Protocol, and of ending child slavery in cocoa production by 2005. Three years past that deadline, they have succeeded in a small amount of outreach work in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, but the idea of a slavery-free label as I would like to see it has apparently languished altogether.

Maybe the idea of a top-down approach like the Harkin-Engel Protocol was never enough to get something like this done. I will continue to look into consumer, non-profit, and NGO campaigns to pressure chocolate producers into selling only slavery-free goods, as well as continuing to contact smaller chocolatiers who don’t make their sources known. For being so direct about the issue and the part they are taking in it, I would like to suggest that the San Francisco chocolatier TCHO deserves your business; if you want something a bit less fancy or from the check-out aisle, please do stick to Hershey’s and the other brands they own (Scharffenberger, Dagoba, etc.).