Black People : 400 years later, Africans; still captured and enslaved? Where's the Outrage?

Most of us have nothing to do with Holloween, but this report is timely

Published on Friday, October 22, 2010 by OtherWords
Big Chocolate's Child Slavery Addiction
This Halloween, try to ensure that your chocolate isn't tainted.
by Andrew Korfhage

Sorry to scare you, but on Halloween much of the chocolate Americans will hand out to trick-or-treaters will be tainted by the labor of enslaved children.

Hershey's, Nestlé, and the other big chocolate companies know this. They promised nearly a decade ago to set up a system to certify that no producers in their supply chains use child labor. They gave themselves a July 2005 deadline for that, which came and went without meaningful action. A second voluntary deadline sailed by as well in 2008. There's a new deadline for voluntary action at the end of this year. Don't hold your breath.

Few Americans had heard of this problem before reporters Sudarsan Raghavan and Sumana Chatterjee exposed the scandalous conditions under which most U.S. chocolate is made, in the summer of 2001.

In one of their articles, a slave described his 13-hour workdays on the 494-acre plantation as brutal, filled with harsh physical labor, punctuated by beatings, and ending with a night of fitful sleep on a wooden plank in a locked room with other slaves.

"The beatings were a part of my life," said the boy who was sold into slavery at not yet 12 years old. "Anytime they loaded you with bags and you fell while you were carrying them, nobody helped you. Instead, they beat you and beat you until you picked it up again."

The reports shocked some members of Congress into action. That fall, Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) and Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) prepared bills to require U.S. chocolate companies--by force of law--to certify their products as slave-free. Engel's bill passed the House, but before Harkin's bill could pass the Senate, the chocolate industry had announced a voluntary four-year plan to clean up its own supply chains, without legislation.

Meanwhile evidence that child slavery still bedevils the chocolate industry isn't hard to find. For example, in late September, a research team from Tulane University (specifically charged by Congress with oversight of the voluntary supply-chain efforts) reported [1] that "the industry is still far from achieving its target…by the end of 2010…and the majority of children exposed to the worst forms of child labor remain unreached."

The just-released documentary The Dark Side of Chocolate [2], by filmmakers Miki Mistrati and U. Roberto Romano takes a less detached tone, going undercover and exposing child slavery in the cocoa supply chain from the inside.

And if that's not enough, the State Department's own 2010 Trafficking in Persons [3] report lists several West African countries where children are traded and taken to work cocoa plantations.



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