![]() The Ivory Coast has fewer than 26 million people. That’s also 1,000 times the official U.S. ![]() In the 2018 to 2019 harvest season, the prevalence of children involved in hazardous child labor in the cocoa sector in the Ivory Coast and Ghana rose to almost 1.5 million children. In October 2020, a new report by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, which was funded by Labor, was released showing child labor had increased again in the cocoa production sector since the Tulane study. As the photo above shows these children wield machetes to do their dangerous harvesting.Ī study conducted by Tulane University in 2015 found that the number of children engaged in the ‘Worst Forms of Child Labor’ on cocoa plantations grew substantially between 20. ![]() In 2004, State estimated there were at least 15,000 child laborers working on cocoa, coffee and cotton farms there. State Department and the Department of Labor have recognized the existence of child slavery in the cocoa industry in the Ivory Coast. That law gives us extraterritorial jurisdiction. It has been reauthorized five times, most recently in 2019 with Congress earmarking $250 million toward the effort. In 2000, Congress and President Bill Clinton enacted a landmark law against human trafficking known as the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, or TVPA. District Court in Columbia just days ago, selecting the U.S. It’s expected to grow to $182 billion by 2025. The global chocolate market is a $136 billion business. Make no mistake, chocolate is big business. The time is ripe to press for an end to profiting off exploitive and forced child labor. This is the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labor as declared by the United Nation’s International Labor Organization. “With their Swissploitation business model the cartel of cocoa companies ‘saves’ more than $20 billion per year buying cheap cocoa,” he said. He noted that a number of chocolate companies run their revenues through Switzerland to avoid taxes in countries, like the United States, where they earn their profits selling chocolate confections. “The business model of the chocolate industry is cruel, exploitative, and illegal because it exploits between 2.2 and 3 million children worldwide, besides exploiting millions of farmers and farmworkers, all to buy cocoa for less than one-third of the real price,” Morales-de la Cruz said. Enslaved cocoa plantation boys with their machetes in Ivory Coast (Terrence Collingsworth / IRAdvocates) Both organizations in Strasbourg, France, seek to raise awareness of child labor in both the cocoa and coffee trades. “This lawsuit against the cocoa and chocolate industry is about much more than the eight Malian citizens who were trafficked and exploited as child slaves to harvest cocoa,” says Fernando Morales-de la Cruz, founder of Cacao for Change and Cartoons for Change. ![]() The plaintiffs are eight former enslaved children who, the court papers charge, were trafficked from their home country Mali, and sold to cocoa farms in the neighboring West African country. In cocoa-growing regions of Ghana and the Ivory Coast more than 43% of all children between the ages of 5 and 17 living in agricultural households are engaged in hazardous work. Most American chocolate is made from Ivory Coast cocoa beans. It outlines the relationships between the candy makers and the cocoa farms in West Africa, which provide 70% of the world’s cocoa supply. READ DAVID CAY JOHNSTON’S ARTICLE: “HALLOWEEN MEANS TRICK, NOT TREAT, FOR CHILD SLAVES“Ī class-action civil suit brought against the big chocolate companies sheds stark light on the entire candy bar industry. ![]() And the West African nation relies on enslaved child laborers to farm its cocoa crops, a well-known fact in the candy world that keeps the cocoa at favorably low prices for the big companies. Industrial food heavyweights like Nestlé USA, Hershey and MARS Inc., rely on cocoa grown in Côte D’Ivoire, the Ivory Coast, to make their confections. Next time you take a bite of a chocolate bar, consider the small hands that farmed the cocoa beans. Lawsuit Cites Global Candy Companies Seeks Freedom, Compensation for Children Forced into Dangerous Work on Cocoa Farms ![]()
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