The dark side of chocolate: Child harvesters toil for little pay
Chocolate is delicious, but child labor is depressing.
By JENNIFER MOTL
Date published: 2/13/2005
I don't waste time feeling guilty about food, but I do feel some twinges about child labor.
Poor West African farm children are still being exploited to make some of the chocolate we buy here in the United States.
Chocolate comes from cacao beans, which grow on trees in rain forests in Mexico, South America, West Africa, the Dominican Republic, Malaysia, Indonesia and New Guinea.
The trees must be at least three to five years old before they bear cacao pods, which must be harvested by hand and hacked open with machetes to release the beans. The beans are fermented and dried for about two weeks before they can be packed and shipped for processing.
For all that labor, the workers get very little.
"West African cocoa revenues average $30 to $108 per year per household member," according to a report by Global Exchange, an international human rights organization.
A fair trade for their labor
Global Exchange recommends that people buy Fair Trade certified chocolate, which guarantees that a minimum price is paid to cacao farmers. The group says that large chocolate corporations, while signing agreements to end child labor and pledging money to foundations, don't pay enough money for cocoa to end the poverty causing children to work on cacao farms.
For now, the only place I have seen the Fair Trade seal is on chocolates sold at upscale grocery stores such as Feast-O-Rama in Fredericksburg. Brands such as Dagoba, Divine and Green & Black's all bear the Fair Trade logo.
Global Exchange also suggests writing or calling chocolate manufacturers to encourage them to take action. Most cocoa and candy-bar packages include a customer-service phone number.
Industry offers assistance
The big chocolate companies, such as Mars, do not buy Fair Trade chocolate.
Instead, the industry donates money to the World Cocoa Foundation, which supports child-labor monitoring programs in West Africa. But the donations are just a tiny percentage of what chocolate companies make each year.
The foundation's budget, which also covers programs in Latin and South America and Indonesia, is $2 million. Retail sales of chocolate are $14 billion a year, said Susan Smith, spokesperson for the National Confectioners Association and Chocolate Manufacturers Association.
Date published: 2/13/2005
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