Where Does Your Chocolate Come From?

by Abigail Knowles Wolfe (BPRW)

The United States is the biggest cocoa consuming nation in the world. We Americans, it seems, love our chocolate. Ever wonder, however, what the big deal is with those seemingly over-priced Fair Trade chocolate bars you see sold for $4 or $5 at Whole Foods and other retailers when a Hershey bar sells for 0.65¢? Cote d’Ivoire, the nation known to us in English as Ivory Coast produces more than 40% of the world’s cocoa. It is a little known fact here in the United States, however, that this cocoa product is most often the fruit of child labor, picked in virtual slavery by African children often lured to Ivory Coast from the West African nations of Mali, Ghana and Burkina Faso.

According to a 2002 survey conducted by the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, more than 280,000 children were working for cocoa plantations across West Africa, most often in dangerous conditions. The majority of these plantations, as previously stated, are located in Ivory Coast. Furthermore cocoa plantation work is on the U.N. International Labor Organization’s list of the worst forms of child labor. Children working in the cocoa industry are said to spray dangerous pesticides, carry abnormally heavy loads, working with machetes and avoiding the bite of poisonous snakes and insects. Remember that these are often 11 year-old children who should instead be in school.

In 2001, two American congressmen, Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Elliot Engel created the Harkin-Engel protocol in reaction to media coverage of abusive labor practices and child slavery on Ivory Coast’s cocoa plantations. This protocol created a certification program allowing American buyers to know whether the chocolate they bought was indeed the product of child labor. Six years later, however, conditions have not changed dramatically for these at-risk child laborers due not only to the indifference of the Ivorian government but also from a lack of response from the world market, specifically the United States.

Jump to the year 2007 and the work of Dutch journalist and filmmaker Teun (Tony) van de Keuken who produces Tony’s Chocoloney chocolate bars, made from cocoa harvested by a 45,000 member collective in Ghana. These bars, as reported by Time magazine on May 25th of 2007 are the first to be packaged and sold as “slavery free.” Van de Keuken, a self-proclaimed chocolate lover began producing his own chocolate bars as a reaction to the lack of progress of such efforts as the Harkin-Engel protocol. Van de Keuken calls international consumers throughout the first world to claim responsibility for ending such atrocious trade practices and refusing to buy chocolate produced by child slave labor.

According to a year 2000 article entitled “The Bitter Taste of Slavery,” written for the BBC, the Malian consul in the Ivory Coast has had to rescue young boys forced to work five years or more on cocoa plantations without payment. These youth reported that they were brutally beaten if they tried to run away. The solution to this problem of course lies in the hands of consumers. The next time we go to the grocery store to buy chocolate the lives of these precious youth living in West Africa should be considered before our own desire for cheap cocoa. Perhaps it is worth cutting back on cheap candy bars and buying that expensive Fair Trade brand? For eating less of the higher quality chocolate bars can improve the lives of West African children in immense and important ways.