Hershey's Chocolate

The Ivory Coast, a West African Country also known as Cote d’Ivoire, grows 70% of the world’s cocoa. The ones who harvest the cocoa beans are typically young boys from the ages of 12 to 16 who have been sold into slave labor and forced to work on the cocoa farms in order to harvest the beans, from which chocolate is made. These boys work in inhumane conditions and extreme abuse.

There are about 600,000 cocoa farms in Cote d’Ivoire with as high as 15,000 children who are forced to work as slaves on the farms. A UNICEF study reports that 200,000 children are trafficked yearly in West and Central Africa. The two countries that are especially implicated in child trafficking in the cocoa trade are Cote d’Ivoire, which is the receiving country, and Mali, which serves as the supplier. The saddest part of this is that the cocoa these children are being forced and beaten to harvest will ultimately end up producing something that most people associate with happiness and pleasure: chocolate.

Although for years these circumstances have been abundant, only recently have people started to advocate for change in Cote d’Ivoire. Fair Trade Towns USA is an organization that promotes better working conditions for cocoa bean farmers and advocates the slave of fair trade products. In fact, a fair trade group in Los Angeles County collected about 100,000 signatures on a petition to get Hershey’s (the leading chocolate producer in the U.S.) to buy cocoa from cooperatives and farms who pay decent wages to their workers and forbid any child labor.

Hershey’s listened to the voice of the people. Hershey’s announced that it will release a new version of Hershey’s Bliss brand that will be 100% made from Rain Forest Alliance-certified farms mostly in Ivory Coast and Ghana. Hershey’s also pledged $10 million to educate West African cocoa farmers on improving their trade and combating child labor.

This is just one step closer to end slavery in the Ivory Coast.



Sources:

http://sojo.net/blogs/2012/02/06/hersheys-fair-trade-announcement-bliss

http://www1.american.edu/ted/chocolate-slave.htm

http://www.whittierdailynews.com/news/ci_19957200