Where Does Your Chocolate Come From?

I had never considered where the chocolate bars that I buy came from until I watched a Marketplace program on TV about the child slave labor that is used to harvest the cocoa beans on the farms in Ghana. The majority of the cocoa bean farmers live in dire poverty with a farm owner earning the equivalent of $500 for the entire year. These farmers need their children and every member of the family to help out on the farm and therefore do not allow them to go to school.

Children as young as nine and ten years of age work ten and twelve hours a day, often in jobs requiring back-breaking labor. The program showed a young girl, aged nine, whose job it was to spray the plants with insecticides. Government programs in some parts of the country are allowing parents to give their children the luxury of going to school and enjoying a childhood by providing free education and uniforms for the children as well as groceries for the families.

Poverty is at such an extreme level in Ghana that many families sell their children into slavery to work on the cocoa plantations for as little as the equivalent of $20. The children are taken from their village and made to work under very harsh conditions. They often do not receive enough to eat and are beaten if they do not perform enough work.

There is a Canadian organization that is promoting Fair Trade Chocolate, which is chocolate that is made from cocoa beans bought directly from the farmers for a fair market value. This chocolate is not yet widely available on store shelves but it can be purchased in specialty stores and online if you do a search. Such chocolate contains a label designating it as Fair Trade Chocolate and certifying that it is free of child labor. The standards set down by TransFair Canada certify that the chocolate has been purchased from farms that have organized themselves into cooperatives for the purpose of receiving the best possible price for their products.