Hard Times

Everyone loves chocolate. What people fail to realize is that this delicious food is farmed by the hands of child slaves in the Ivory Coast and all over the world. Image courtesy of Youth Are Awesome.

The world chocolate industry is a 80 billion dollar a year industry. UNICEF estimates that nearly a half-million children work on farms across Ivory Coast, which produces nearly 40% of the world’s supply of cocoa. Image courtesy of Globalization. Wiki Spaces.

Slave traders in Africa, where most cocoa is harvested, seek out young boys ranging from the age of 6 to 16 and are sell them to cocoa farmers in the Ivory Coast. Agents hang around bus stations looking for children that are alone or are begging for food. They lure the kids into traveling with them, under the disguise of headmasters and teachers looking to provide the boys with food and an education, and sell the children to farmers in need of cheap labor. Image courtesy of CNN.

Children as young as 5 work with machetes to cut open thousands of cocoa pods each day. Children are either sold or abducted onto these cocoa plantations. Without receiving education or pay, these children are sold into a life of slavery. Image courtesy of Global Exchange.

Children labor daily to cut cocoa pods out of the tall trees in this photo. Their only tools: a huge machete knife and their hands. Image courtesy of The Freedom Generation.

They must carry backbreaking sacks of cocoa. They are often starved, beaten and locked up at night without proper facilities. They are held against their will, bound and tortured and, in many cases, killed. Image courtesy of CNN.

The world’s chocolate industry thrives because of the work of these slaves. Like in this picture they pretty much carry the world wide industry on their backs. Most of these slaves do not even know why they farm the cocoa much less know what chocolate tastes like. Image courtesy of The Australian.

Cocoa beans in their raw form are found in these large pods. After they are farmed, the pods are then cut open and the beans are taken out. This is all done by the child slaves. Photo courtesy of All Things Chocolate.

After the cocoa beans are harvested, they are shipped out to various countries where they are then made into chocolate as we know it. The people of America alone consume 20% of the world’s chocolate, that’s 3 billion pounds annually. Image courtesy of The Food Network.

Industry leaders such as Nestle and Hershey’s have been found to have used slavery produced chocolate in many of their products. Nestle is currently fighting a child slavery case. Maybe next time you eat your “Crunch” bar you will think about who made it. Photo courtesy of New York Times.

The FairTrade corporation is a company that has set out to limit and end slavery in the world. They label foods that are produced by workers and not slaves. The corporation also makes sure that Third World countries are properly compensated for the goods they produce and export. Image courtesy of Wear it Fair.

To know if your candy bar was produced from goods not made from slavery look for the FairTrade logo in the corner of the package. Other companies like Equal Exchange also place logos on fairly produced organic goods. Image courtesy of Sustainable Sphere.