What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word, “Chocolate?” Probably a great big milk chocolate bar or Hershey’s kiss comes to mind, immediately followed by salivation or even drooling. We think of Valentine’s Day, our mothers, or loved ones. But what really happens behind the scenes of producing this billion dollar industry? The sweet, happy, positive connotation connected with the word “Chocolate” is actually not so sweet. Turns out it is a bitter-sweet relationship; that of chocolate and those who produce it. So where does chocolate really come from?
Chocolate is a thirteen billion dollar industry and forty-three percent of the world’s cocoa comes from plantations on Africa’s Ivory Coast. Unfortunately, most of it is produced by children who are used to harvest cocoa beans against their will. Because of the recent recession, families in Africa have been forced to reduce their labor costs, causing kids to be pulled out of school to work on the farms and even involved in child slavery. Some parents even sell their children to plantations to child-slave traffickers to have their kids work on the plantations to gain a profit but even at that, parents are scammed into thinking they will gain benefits from giving away their children when, in reality they only get $1.50 to $14 and that’s it. In addition, the money made from harvesting cocoa beans or selling a child into slave labor is still minimal and families remain poor because of the little money can receive, if any. People who actually get paid to work on the plantations are given so little money that they can’t support themselves and are on the verge of starvation. The article, “Blood and Chocolate,” states that workers get severely beaten if they can’t handle the weight of the bags of the beans or attempt to escape.
What makes the situation even worse is that the children sold, captured and forced into slavery never are never released from captivity. According to UNICEF, over two-hundred thousand children are traded throughout the cocoa bean industry every year and that the majorities of girls “end up in domestic or sex trades, while the boys get used as manual labor in a variety of trades such as coffee and cocoa.”
Since child slavery for harvesting cocoa beans is such a prominent issue, people are trying to instill certain rules that aim to lessen and eventually rid of the unfairness tied into the chocolate industry. Fair Trade for example, is a lot like the minimum wage regulation in America. It is a rule that requires bosses, or in this case officials and traffickers, to pay their workers a minimum price per pound of the product. If every official in the chocolate industry were to use this system, the poverty level of the hundreds of thousands of Africans involved in cocoa bean plantations would sharply decrease since the workers would be paid fairly for their hard work.
The real world of the chocolate industry is a real eye-opener. Reading these articles made me wonder how something so good could come from such an awful system. It also makes me curious about the realities of other popular international billion dollar industries and products; what is the truth behind those? It is important in research projects like this to analyze the truth about global unfairness and low-wages since it gives people a truthful, worldly perspective on how our economy actually operates.
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