Feb 10 2006
Chocolate Companies Sued
GUEST: Bama Athreya, Deputy Director at the International Labor Rights Fund
As Valentine’s Day approaches, many Americans are shopping the aisles for heart shaped boxes of chocolates for the one they love. However a lawsuit has now been filed against chocolate manufacturers and processors Nestle, Cargill, and Archer Daniels. The suit charges these companies with torture, trafficking, and forced child labor on West African cocoa farms. It’s being filed by the DC-based International Labor Rights Fund. U.S. chocolate industries had pledged to end illegal child labor on cocoa farms by July 2005 through what’s called the “Harkin-Engel Protocol.” The protocol has long since expired, and no system standards were set.
For more information visit www.laborrights.org, and www.globalexchange.org.
If you don’t want to be complicit in slave labor, there are alternatives. The Organic Consumers Association has compiled a list of fair trade and organic retailers that can be found at www.organicconsumers.org/valentines.
2 Responses to “Chocolate Companies Sued”
These accusations are isolated incidents; this does not reflect the true reality. Many migrant workers from neighboring countries come to Cote d’Ivoire with hopes of earning an honest living in order to provide for their family in their home land.
This claim is ludicrous. In every nation you will find in some form or another children learning the trades of their parents and in particularly developing countries. How can a nation as great as the United States of America point their fingers, (a nation built by African Slaves) in American the people were really SLAVES….Men, Women, and Children?
Cote d’Ivoire is in the mist of political conflict, these kinds of accusations are just another means to take the livelihood away from the millions of people who live off the revenues from their cocoa. The real question should be, IS fair trade, ready fair trade. The farmers need assistance at all levels, but instead they are exploited by All.
I am an American citizen, live in Cote d’Ivoire currently and know a large amount of farmers. The farmers are proud people; they would not harm their children. Furthermore the planes are not full of people going to Cote d’Ivoire to truly verify the statues by living in their environment.
The chocolate manufactures need to purchase the cocoa at better prices and reinvest in the nations which provides the natural resource to enrich their companies.
Cote d’Ivoire is getting a bad rap due to the political situation and the American people should be aware that the farmers are not harming children.
A concerned citizen
I don’t know, Ella. You start off as if you’re disagreeing with the show, and end up in agreement. I think the latter position is correct. It’s not farmers exploiting their children that’s being alleged in the lawsuit, it’s the chocolate companies who both use child labour and exploit the farmers, paying them as little as possible and thereby hurting the children in those cocoa farming families.
I totally agree that the chocolate manufacturers need to pay more for their product, exactly the kind of Fair Trade you mentioned, instead of going around to get the cheapest price possible, probably getting farmers and farm communities to compete against each other by offering lower prices. At the end of the day the chocolate manufacturer goes chuckling to the bank and the farmers who competed against each other are all worse off. I hope I’m wrong and that cocoa farmers there have some kind of strong collective voice, a union or co-op or something, but it their economic relations with the West are like most of the rest of the underdeveloped world, such collecive strength has probably been suppressed and not allowed to freely form.
If the manufacturers pay more for cocoa, then Western consumers will have to pay more for chocolate. I think I can handle that. I’d like to see chocolate bars shrink in size as the cost per gram increases so that a $1 chocolate bar will continue to cost $1, but will be made by mnmanufacturing smaller and smaller. Already, I’d think a 20 g small bar of Swiss chocolate is much better than any North American domestically produced “candy bar” that weighs three times as much and is laden with wafers, caramel, fudge, marshmallow etc. — all nice things, but sometimes you just want pure, top-quality chocolate, untainted by children’s blood or their parents’ tears.