The dark side of chocolate

|PIC1|This Christmas people around the world will be filling stockings, wrapping up and feasting on chocolate.

As one of the cheapest and most readily available luxuries, chocolate companies use high quality ingredients including coercion, force, exploitation and violence to make annual profits of over $10 billion in the USA alone.

The world’s largest exporter and producer of cocoa is Cote D’Ivoire, West Africa where over a third of the world’s chocolate originates from.

It is in Cote D’Ivoire, surrounded by mass unemployment, consequences of civil war, poverty and unstable global markets that parents with malnourished children, children left homeless or orphans from war are tricked or forced into a murky world of exploitation and enslavement on cocoa plantations. And it is within this hidden environment of trafficked child laborers that our luxury pleasures are born.

Thousands of boys from within the Cote D’Ivoire and neighboring countries are duped into leaving home to take well paying jobs elsewhere. It is only upon arrival at the plantation that their fate becomes clear. As a teenage boy rescued from a cocoa plantation explained ‘our master used us as slaves – he took us and never paid us a penny. He said if anyone tried to escape he would be caught and killed.’

Admitting there was a problem, the chocolate industry set up the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI) in 2001 committing to eradicate the worst forms of child labour by 2005. The deadline came and went. For years, the chocolate industry presented itself as an impenetrable wall of unison, hiding behind the ICI with each company stating they were doing the best they can.

Trying to highlight the problem and necessary measures to improve human rights, Stop The Traffik, a global movement made up of organisations and individuals fighting the trade in people, met with the chocolate industry in 2007. Objections to the industry’s practices were met with a shrug of the shoulders. Despite multi billion dollar profits, it was just a bit too complicated fulfilling the promises of the ICI, ending the worst forms of child labour and making traffik free chocolate.

Around the world, Stop The Traffik campaigners lobbied chocolate companies by writing letters, making phone calls, face-booking, tweeting and making choices in supermarkets by opting for traffik free chocolate.

As a response to the campaign and growing consumer awareness, change is beginning to take place. Global companies are beginning to come out from their hiding places, breaking free from the cover of the ICI and acting independently to supply traffik free chocolate. Cadbury launched fair trade Dairy Milk, Mars followed making promises for their Galaxy range and Nestlé will be supplying traffik free 4 finger Kit Kats in January 2010 with regular Kit Kats to follow.

Here at Stop The Traffik, we are delighted to see the campaign working and feel inspired that so many people have taken part. There are however important questions that remain.

Nestlé are giving us an ethical option, that fact cannot be denied. But it’s important to see that four finger Kit Kats are not the biggest selling bar, is it a token gesture? what about Aero, Milkybar, Yorkie, Rolos, Smarties, After Eight, Black Magic, Dairy Box, Quality Streets, Toffo, Heaven, Animal Bars, Lion Bar, Caramac, Walnut Whip, Toffee Crisp, Crunch Bars and Munchies (not to mention chocolate biscuits). Human rights are upheld and worth it for one bar but not the rest?

Having escaped from a plantation in Cote D’Ivoire, Viktor – a boy trafficked from Mali said ‘when the owner beat someone to the point he could not move he took him out of the plantation and we never saw that person again. When people eat chocolate, they are enjoying something I suffered to make, they are eating my flesh’.
Suddenly our comfort food is no longer comforting.

In the words of our CEO, Ruth Dearnley, "The worst thing we can do is think what the chocolate industry has done is enough! The industry needs to know that we will not stop until every bar in every shop is traffik."



Victoria Kuhr is Community Action and Resources Officer at Stop The Traffik. To find out how to get involved visit www.stopthetraffik.org