Il,c ÌJJortlanò (©bseruer
Page 12
October 31, 2012
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The Spooky Side of Chocolate
There's nothing
sweet about
child labor.
by A ndrew
K orehage
This Halloween, many
of the chocolate goodies
handed out to American children
dressed as goblins and witches will
have aghoulish history of their own.
In the cocoa fields where many of
these chocolates originate, West
African children work grueling
hours — some of them trafficked or
forced into this labor— to make the
sweet treats we enjoy here in the
United States. Nobody wants to
know ingly p urchase p roducts
tainted with exploitation, which is
why the most responsible choco
late companies have been working
to certify that their products are free
of child labor ever since this prob
lem first gained wide public expo
sure back in 2001.
Unfortunately for the children in
the cocoa fields, those responsible
companies haven’t yet included the
giant chocolate corporations whose
can d ies line the im pulse-buy
shelves near the cash registers of
nearly every gas station, conve
nience store, and supermarket. The
companies working hardest to pro
tect children and pay living wages
to the workers in the cocoa fields
have been the smaller, less widely
known brands acting voluntarily to
create those protections.
It didn’t have to be this way.
Back in 2001, the chocolate
industry as a whole was on
notice from no less an author
ity than C ongress, w hich
sought to legally prohibit the
use of forced child labor in
chocolate products sold in the
United States. The chocolate in
dustry successfully watered down
the proposed legislation into a se
ries of voluntary goals with unen
forceable deadlines, which Big
industry knew in 2001 that it had a
problem severe enough to require
legislative intervention by Con
gress, but put off addressing that
problem for 10 years. And then, it
set its eventual targets another eight
years into the future. That’s a life
time for a child bom in the Ivory
Coast at the turn of the millennium.
An entire generation of children
could have been protected by a
chocolate industry that refused to
act.
The problem is still real. The Child
for their work.
Chocolate lovers must keep the
pressure on Big Chocolate, and hold
those companies accountable so
they meet their eventual deadlines.
While 2020 is too far off, a shift in the
industry’s priorities will nonethe
less benefit the millions of cocoa
farmers in West Africa — whose
labor helps our children have a
happy Halloween.
In the meantime, what can you
do?
This Halloween, you can pur
chase chocolates for your trick-or-
treaters from the smaller, more re
sponsible companies that foster
direct relationships with their sup
ply chains, and have been certify
ing their cocoa for years.
Here are some examples: Alter-
E co
C h o c o la te
M inis:
a lte r e c o f o o d s .c o m /p r o d u c ts /
chocolate; Coco-Zen Chocolate
Labor Cocoa Coordinating Group "Halloween Shapes" & Minis: coco-
prepared a report for Sen. Tom Harkin zen.com; Divine Chocolate Medal
(D-IA) back in January, which re lions: divinechocolateusa.com; En
ported continued child trafficking dangered Species Chocolate Or
in Ghana and Ivory Coast. "Thou ganic Bites: chocolatebar.com ;
sands of children are engaged in Equal Exchange Organic Chocolate
hazardous activities in cocoa farm Minis: equalexchange.coop/choco-
ing, including clearing fields, using late-bars; Mama Ganache Scary
machetes, and applying pesticides," Skulls, Mini Pumpkins, & Choco
according to the report.
late Disks: mama-ganache.com
And a 2011 report prepared by
Andrew Korfhage is Green
Tulane University confirms that only America's online and special
around 10 percent of the child work projects
editor,
ers in Ghana, and less than five www. greenamerica. org. Distrib
percent of child laborers in Ivory uted
via
O therW ords
Coast receive any form of payment (OtherWords. org)
? When it comes to workers' rights,
some o f the most influential
government officials we 'll be voting for
are ones whose names don't actually
appear on the ballot.
Chocolate— companies like Mars,
Nestle, and Hershey — then pro
ceeded to ignore for nearly a de
cade.
In 2009, Mars and Nestle began
making baby steps to use third-
party certifiers to monitor child la
bor in small percentages of their
product lines. Hershey — the in
dustry laggard— finally announced
weeks before Halloween that it
would take action by the year 2020
(the same year Mars has publicly
announced as its target to expand
certification).
Think about it: The chocolate