Is There Child Slavery in Your Chocolate

Link:   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-robbins/is-there-child-slavery-in_b_737737.html

We live in cynical times. We are no longer surprised when we find that a major company, like BP or Monsanto, has done something horrible, and then made things worse by hiding the consequences of its actions from the public.

But even in a day of widespread and flagrant abuse of power, there is a dark side to the operations of the Hershey company that make it particularly egregious. Hershey, which is the largest chocolate manufacturer in the world, gets most of its cocoa from West Africa. The company purchases the primary ingredient in its products from sources notorious for abusive labor practices including forced labor, human trafficking, and child slavery.

In 2009, the Payson Center for International Development at Tulane University published an "assessment of child labor in the cocoa supply chain." The study found child labor to be widespread in the very regions of West Africa, particularly Ivory Coast, where Hershey sources its cocoa, and that forced or involuntary child labor was common in these areas.