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Slavery in the Chocolate Industry
In 2012, CNN published a series of investigations as part of its “Freedom Project,” which found
that “child labor, trafficking and slavery are rife” in the chocolate industry.1 The CNN
investigations revealed that large numbers of children were being held as slaves on cocoa farms
in Ivory Coast, a small nation on the western coast of Africa.
Forty-five percent of the chocolate we consume in the United States and in the rest of the world
is made from cocoa beans grown and harvested on farms in Ivory Coast. Few realize that a
portion of Ivory Coast cocoa beans that goes into most of the chocolate we eat was grown and
harvested by children who work as slaves. The slaves are boys between 12 and 16—but
sometimes as young as 9—kidnapped from villages in surrounding nations and sold to the cocoa
farmers by traffickers. The farmers whip, beat, and starve the boys to force them to do the hot,
difficult work of clearing the fields, harvesting the beans, and drying them in the sun. The boys
work from sunrise to sunset. Some are locked in at night in windowless rooms where they sleep
on bare wooden planks. Far from home, unsure of their location, unable to speak the language,
isolated in rural areas, and threatened with harsh beatings if they try to get away, the boys rarely
attempt to escape their nightmare situation. Those who try are usually caught, severely beaten as
an example to others, and then locked in solitary confinement. Every year unknown numbers of
these boys die or are killed on the cocoa farms that supply our chocolate.
The plight of the enslaved children was first widely publicized at the turn of the twenty-first
century when True Vision, a British television company, took videos of slave boys working on
Ivory Coast farms and made a documentary depicting the sufferings of the boys. In September
2000, the documentary was broadcast in Great Britain, the United States, and other parts of the
world. The U.S. State Department, in its Year 2001 Human Rights Report, estimated that about
15,000 children from the neighboring nations of Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Togo had been
sold into slavery to labor on Ivory Coast cocoa farms.
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Although slavery is illegal in Ivory Coast and the minimum age of employment is 14, the laws
are poorly enforced. Open borders, a shortage of enforcement officers, widespread poverty, and
the willingness of local officials to accept bribes from people trafficking in slaves all contribute
to the problem. In addition, prices for cocoa beans in global markets have been depressed most
years since 1996. As prices declined, the already impoverished cocoa farmers—who earn less
than $2 per day on average—turned to slavery to cut their labor costs. Although prices began to
improve during the early years of the twenty-first century, cocoa prices fell again in 2004 and
remained low until the summer of 2010, when they again began to rise. The poverty that
motivated many Ivory Coast cocoa farmers to buy children trafficked as slaves was aggravated
by other factors besides low cocoa prices. Working on small isolated farms of one to three acres,
cocoa farmers cannot communicate among themselves nor with the outside world to learn what
cocoa is selling for. Consequently, they are at the mercy of a local middleman, a “traitant” or
“pisteur,” who drives out to the farms, buys the farmers’ cocoa for half of its current market
price, and hauls it away in his truck. Unable to afford trucks themselves, the farmers must rely on
the middlemen to get their cocoa to market. The traitant takes the cocoa beans to a warehouse in
a nearby large town where they are combined with the beans harvested on other farms, and
where the major exporters, such as Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Cargill, purchase the
cocoa beans to export to their processing plants.
Chocolate is a $13 billion industry in the United States, where Americans consume over 3 billion
pounds each year. The names of the four largest U.S. chocolate manufacturers—all of whom use
the morally “tainted” cocoa beans from Ivory Coast in their products—are well known: Hershey
Foods Corp. (maker of Hershey’s milk chocolate, Reeses, and Almond Joy), Mars, Inc. (maker of
M&Ms, Mars, Twix, Dove, and Milky Ways), Nestlé USA, (maker of Nestlé Crunch, Kit Kat,
Baby Ruth, and Butterfingers), and Kraft Foods (which also uses chocolate in its baking and
breakfast products). Less well known, but a key part of the industry, are the names of ADM Co.,
Barry Callebaut, and Cargill Inc., all of whom serve as middlemen who buy the cocoa beans
from Ivory Coast, grind and process them, and then sell the processed cocoa to the chocolate
manufacturers.
Pressure Leads to Action
That many farmers in Ivory Coast use slave boys to farm their cocoa beans was already known to
American chocolate-makers when media reports first began publicizing the issue at the
beginning of the twenty-first century. In 2001, the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, a trade
group of U.S. chocolate manufacturers (whose members include Hershey, Mars, Nestlé, and
others) admitted to newspapers that they had been aware of the use of slave boys on Ivory Coast
cocoa farms for some time. Pressured by various antislavery groups, the Chocolate
Manufacturers Association stated on June 22, 2001, that it “condemned” “these practices” and
agreed to fund a “study” of the situation.
On June 28, 2001, U.S. Representative Eliot Engel sponsored a bill in the U.S. House of
Representatives that aimed at setting up a labeling system that would inform consumers whether
the chocolate they were buying was “slave–free” (i.e., guaranteed not to have been produced by
slave children). The measure passed the House by a vote of 291 to 115. However, when U.S.
Senator Tom Harkin introduced the same bill in the Senate, it met resistance. The U.S. chocolate
industry—led by Mars, Hershey, Kraft Foods and ADM and with the help of lobbyists Bob Dole
