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In 2001, the report A Taste of Slavery: How Your Chocolate May be Tainted won a George Polk Award.In it were claims that traffickers promised paid work, housing, and education to children who were forced to labour and undergo severe abuse, that some children were held forcibly on farms and worked up to 100 hours per week, and that attempted escapees were beaten.
Cocoa plantations in Ghana and the Ivory Coast provide 80% of the world's chocolate, according to CorpWatch. [4] Chocolate producers around the world have been pressured to “verify that their chocolate is not the product of child labor or slavery.” [5]
Boy collecting cocoa after beans have dried. The Harkin–Engel Protocol, [a] sometimes referred to as the Cocoa Protocol, is an international agreement aimed at ending the worst forms of child labor (according to the International Labour Organization's Convention 182) and forced labor (according to ILO Convention 29) in the production of cocoa, the main ingredient in chocolate.
Class action lawsuits were filed against Hershey's, Nestle and Mars. The suits claim each knowingly had cocoa sources linked to child slaves.
The crop is grown in Ivory Coast mostly by smallholder farmers planting on 1 to 3 hectares. [10] The pods containing the beans are harvested when a sufficient number are ripe, opened to separate the seeds and pulp from the outer rind, and the seeds and pulp are usually allowed to ferment somewhere on the farm, before the seeds are dried in a central location.
Evidence emerged in the late 1990s of systematic slavery in cacao plantations in West Africa; see the chocolate and slavery article. [62] According to the U.S. State Department, more than 109,000 children were working on cocoa farms alone in Ivory Coast in "the worst forms of child labour" in 2002. [91]
Human slavery and child labor are some of the current challenges that ICCO is battling to solve in west Africa specifically Ivory Coast and Ghana. Young boys and girls as young as 12 to 16 years old are lured from their homes then sold to cacao plantation owners in Ivory Coast where they worked as field hands, domestic workers and even prostitutes.
Dark Side of Chocolate A feature documentary, The Dark Side of Chocolate explores West African children in cocoa production . The 2010 documentary The Dark Side of Chocolate alleged that Nestlé purchased cocoa beans from Ivory Coast plantations that use child slave labor.