Child Labor: The Hidden Ingredient to the Billion-Dollar Chocolate Industry?

Along with flowers and jewelry, Valentine's Day is the holiday of chocolate. Lots of chocolate. Milk chocolate, dark chocolate, caramel-filled chocolate, chocolate hearts, chocolate kisses. On Valentine's Day, chocolate is the currency in which people are supposed to trade their love. Little do they know that chocolate might have been made with slave labor. Over 40 percent of the world’s cocoa, the primary ingredient in chocolate, comes from West African nation of the Ivory Coast. The State Department estimates that over one hundred thousand children in the Ivory Coast’s cocoa industry work under “the worst forms of child labor.”

Some ten thousand children are victims of human trafficking or enslavement. These child workers labor for long, punishing hours, using dangerous tools and facing frequent exposure to dangerous pesticides as they travel great distances in the grueling heat. Those who labor as slaves must also suffer frequent beatings and other cruel treatment. While the Ivory Coast supplies more of the world's cocoa beans than anywhere else, Americans, for their part, are some of the world's biggest buyers ­ spending some $13 billion dollars a year on chocolate. And US chocolate manufacturers continue to purchase and reap profits from child labor. Brian Campbell is an attorney with the International Labor Rights Fund. He joins me from Washington DC. We invited a representative from the Chocolate Manufacturers Association to join us but they declined our invitation.

* Brian Campbell. Attorney with the International Labor Rights Fund.

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