Yes, I’m very guilty of indulging in those $9, single-origin chocolate bars with the pretty wrapping paper. They’re so delicious, and I can never believe how much I will pay for the price of pleasure. But the gnarly reality is that I’m helping the unending cycle of child laborers in West Africa; many of whom are pressed into service on cocoa plantations, working long hours for such low pay that advocacy organizations deem as child slavery. Chocolate consumers, we’re all going to hell.
Seventy percent of the world’s cocoa supply is grown in just two countries, Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire, yet despite global demand for their product, cocoa farmers in those countries earn wages that amount to about a third of what’s considered the poverty line. They can’t afford to hire workers to harvest the cocoa crops, so many pull their children out of school to work with them on the plantations. Even direr are the circumstances under which children from neighboring unstable countries such as Burkina Faso are trafficked across the newly permeable borders of Cote D’Ivoire, which emerged from a tumultuous decade characterized by two civil wars in 2011.
In 2009, the US Department of State estimated that more than 100,000 children worked in Cote D’Ivoire’s cocoa industry, with ten percent of them victims of human trafficking. In 2010, the Department found that over 43 percent of Ghanaian children between the ages of five and 14 worked on cocoa plantations. To get some background on this intensely controversial issue, I spoke with Abby Mills, director of campaigns at the International Labor Rights Forum in Washington, DC. Full story...
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Seventy percent of the world’s cocoa supply is grown in just two countries, Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire, yet despite global demand for their product, cocoa farmers in those countries earn wages that amount to about a third of what’s considered the poverty line. They can’t afford to hire workers to harvest the cocoa crops, so many pull their children out of school to work with them on the plantations. Even direr are the circumstances under which children from neighboring unstable countries such as Burkina Faso are trafficked across the newly permeable borders of Cote D’Ivoire, which emerged from a tumultuous decade characterized by two civil wars in 2011.
In 2009, the US Department of State estimated that more than 100,000 children worked in Cote D’Ivoire’s cocoa industry, with ten percent of them victims of human trafficking. In 2010, the Department found that over 43 percent of Ghanaian children between the ages of five and 14 worked on cocoa plantations. To get some background on this intensely controversial issue, I spoke with Abby Mills, director of campaigns at the International Labor Rights Forum in Washington, DC. Full story...
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