U.S. report: Much of the world's chocolate supply relies on more than 1 million child workers
The world’s chocolate companies depend on cocoa produced in West Africa with more than 1 million child laborers, according to a new report sponsored by the Labor Department.
The findings represent a remarkable failure by chocolate companies to fulfill their long-standing promise to eradicate the practice from their cocoa supply chains.
Under pressure from Congress in 2001, some of the world’s largest chocolate companies — including Nestle, Hershey and Mars — pledged to eradicate “the worst forms of child labor” from their sources in West Africa, the world’s most important supply. Since then, however, the firms have missed deadlines to eliminate child labor in 2005, 2008 and 2010.
Each time, they have promised to do better, but the new report indicates that the incidence of child labor in West African cocoa production has risen.
An investigation by The Washington Post of the use of child labor in the cocoa industry found that representatives of some of the biggest and best-known brands could not guarantee that any of their chocolate was produced without child labor. One reason is that 20 years after pledging to eradicate the practice, chocolate companies still could not identify the farms where all their cocoa comes from, let alone whether child labor was used in producing it.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-report-much-of-the-worlds-chocolate-supply-relies-on-more-than-1-million-child-workers/ar-BB1aaQM9?li=BBnb7Kz