First prize: Humanist Essay Contest

Published in the Humanist, September/October 2008

On a sidewalk somewhere in London, a young boy with wide eyes and ruffled blond hair walks home from school, finds a coin on the street, and uses it to buy himself a bar of chocolate at the local candy store. He peels open the wrapping to find a golden slip of paper--a winning ticket into London’s most famous chocolate factory. Most Americans know this boy as Charlie Bucket, a simple boy from a simple family, who brings us into the world of chocolate production--the world of Willy Wonka. Willy Wonka almost had us believing that chocolate flows in streams through meadows of gumdrops and lollipops. But actually, it grows on trees.

Though that sounds fairly fanciful too, it is closer to reality than one would imagine. Chocolate production can be traced further back than the factories in which they are refined and packaged by Wonka’s Oompa-Loompas. They begin in fields in the Ivory Coast of West Africa, as well as areas of Brazil, Indonesia, and Latin America. These areas produce different species of cocoa trees, the most common of which is the Forastero tree. Once these trees are fully grown, cocoa beans, the most important ingredient in chocolate, can be extracted from the seeds of the trees and used to create the unique flavor of chocolate.

So how do the cocoa beans get to the factory where they can be dried, roasted, and de-shelled for the final product? Someone must pick them off the trees and export them out to the factory. Farmers in the Ivory Coast continue to export the greatest number of cocoa beans worldwide, accounting for 43 percent of the world’s supply, but most of those farmers have never tasted or even seen the final product. 450,000 small farms of twelve acres or less produce billions of pounds of chocolate each year. Most of the farmers who manage this land are poor, small-scale landholders who are forced to sell their product to deceitful middlemen at unreasonably low prices. Cut off from all knowledge of the global market, farmers are left helpless and defenseless against misrepresentation of world prices.

In order to lower production costs and balance the scales, these farmers must keep their own children out of school to help cultivate the cocoa beans, and eventually even begin to rely on trafficked children who are kidnapped and later sold (at a going rate of US $35) into a life of slave labor. According to the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, over 60 percent of these children are under the age of fourteen and work over twelve hours a day, filling and lifting fifty-pound bags of beans. Most are underfed, mistreated, kept in filthy living conditions, and have never been to school. While our children are guarded against playing with anything slightly sharp or pointed, the children of the Ivory Coast work day in and day out with heavy machetes, and no chance of medical care in the event of an accident. Many of those who have been trafficked have lost their homes and families forever, and will spend the remainder of their lives working on these fields to support a stranger’s farm, and ultimately to fuel the multi-billion dollar chocolate industry that feeds all the consumers of our far-removed world.

Unknowingly, most Americans support this child slave labor every day or at least every week, when they wake up to a steaming cup of hot chocolate or indulge in a square of dark chocolate, 60 to 80 percent of which is pure cocoa. Perhaps there truly was a time when the occasional piece of chocolate was as innocent and pure as it was in the world of Charlie Bucket, but in the year 2001 matters turned sinister. BBC reporters revealed what they discovered when they investigated the case of a ship leaving Benin that had been denied access to a port in Gabon. The ship was carrying a few dozen boys and girls, destined for the cocoa fields of Central Africa. Some were children from the slums whose parents willingly sold them into servitude, others had their names added to the list of missing children, stolen and lost forever.

No one can say how long major chocolate companies have known about the injustices taking place in West Africa, but it can be said that since 2001 they have done little to acknowledge or improve the situation, and most continue to source their cocoa from areas that support child slave labor. Shortly after this BBC documentary was released, a U.S. bill proposing a federal system to certify and label eligible cocoa products as “slave-free”, thereby increasing consumer awareness was on its way to the Senate. For major chocolate companies like Nestlé, Cadbury, and many others, this represented a serious threat to sales, and with the help of the Chocolate Manufacturers Association and a couple of former senators, they were able to dismiss the bill before it could reach the Senate.

The final compromise between humanitarians and chocolate companies rested in the 2001 Harkin-Engel Protocol, a document that obligated signatories to follow a four-year, six-point plan that would allow companies to completely abolish the use of child labor in the chocolate industry by 2005. At that point, signatories would be rewarded with certification as a “slave-free” company. Companies committed themselves to developing and instituting a series of programs in West Africa to improve the quality of life for cocoa farmers and to educate them on the consequences of child trafficking and labor.

Sadly, few changes have been made, few programs have been launched, and little initiative has been taken by major manufacturers to step away from child labor. While companies like M&M/Mars have failed to fulfill the terms of the Harkin-Engel Protocol, they have been enormously successful in diverting attention away from bad publicity and distracting Americans with images of colorful, glossy M&M characters with huge grins, adorable, batting eyelashes, and witty, light-hearted remarks, or similar ploys. Hershey’s and M&M/Mars, which together control two-thirds of the chocolate market in the United States, both continue to source their cocoa from child slave labor in the Ivory Coast. Ben and Jerry’s, Cadbury, Nestlé, Mars, See’s Candies, Godiva, Kraft, Fowler’s Chocolate, and Toblerone are no less culpable.

The list of culprits includes nearly all the names of our familiar old friends, the most prevalent and well-loved chocolate companies in the industry. But thanks to the Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO), chocoholics still have something to turn to. The FLO was initiated in the fall of 2002 and works to certify various chocolate companies based on a few criteria that ensure no exploitation was involved along the way. Criteria that must be met include the establishment of a just price that is carefully calculated to cover the costs of sustainable production, direct trade, and contact with farmers; the development of marketing co-ops with the foundations of democratic decision-making; and the payment of a premium that gets directed to the co-op community. The FLO reserves the right to track and verify all documentation that provides evidence of payments made and communications between farmers and manufacturers.

While companies that prescribe to the FLO criteria are less prevalent and more expensive, knowing that a little spare change and a more critical eye is all it takes to make each bite guilt-free (and all the sweeter because of it) is worth the trouble. Companies that are Fairtrade certified include Scharffen Berger Chocolate, Dean’s Beans, Cloud Nine, and Green and Black’s. All chocolate labeled organic such as Newman’s Own and Dagoba are fair game as well, since the USDA enforces its own monitoring and sets of requirement designed to protect against exploitation.

In 2007 a new company was added to the list, Divine Chocolate, Ltd. This company, which began business in October of 2007, appears to be the most successful to date. But what is truly new about this company is that it is the world’s first chocolate company to be at least partially owned by the actual farmer. Divine Chocolate is co-owned by a Ghanaian cocoa farmer’s cooperative in the town of Kuapa Kokoo. Farmers in the cooperative are ensured a minimum price and a “social premium” that helps protect them from fluctuations in the world market price, and provide their children an opportunity to attend school and ultimately end the cycle of poverty.

FLO isn’t the only organization that has been working against the crisis of child slave labor. Organizations like the Child Labor Coalition and the Sustainable Tree Crops Program have taken on the most fundamental and necessary task of all. They are working from the bottom up, teaching farmers how to market their products, what buyers are looking for, how to increase production of higher-quality cocoa, and how to steer clear of middlemen. They are also working to find a way to get radio updates about the world market prices so that isolated farmers are aware of what is a fair price and what isn’t. Progress continues to be made even now, but at a slower rate than one would hope. Organizations like the ones mentioned are a rarity, and have the means to support only a few of the many farmer communities that exist. And because non-Fairtrade Organizations continue to dominate the market, Fairtrade sales still represent less than 1 percent of all chocolate sales.

There is, of course, reason to believe that the more consumers are educated on the issues behind the products they purchase, the more intelligently they will select their items. The recent trend towards environmentally-friendly consumption, for example, is a result of exhaustive media coverage on environmental issues. People are willing to pay for things grown organically, and for paper or canvas bags rather than plastic ones. Ideally, any dilemma sweet-toothed consumers face at the checkout counter of their local bakery or candy store need not extend beyond anxiety over an upcoming dentist’s appointment. Nevertheless, in our less-than-ideal-world, buying any product that contains cocoa now demands that we ask ourselves whether we are willing to support the manufacturers of an item whose byproducts are the sweat, labor, and blood of child slaves.

Selecting items at the supermarket is increasingly becoming a test of consumers’ morality and humanity. As the situation currently stands, we must depend on the strength of that humanity and morality to put pressure on non-Fairtrade products, and in doing so, provide them with their just dessert. Ultimately, it’s a small price to pay for the lives of others.