If you haven’t already bought your goodies, I’d like to delicately suggest this article on Cocoa’s child laborers to you. If you can’t make it past the Washington Post’s paywall, I’ll summarize: despite pledges made almost two decades ago, Mars, Nestlé and Hershey still buy the cocoa for their chocolate from farms that use child labor.
One reason is that nearly 20 years after pledging to eradicate child labor, chocolate companies still cannot identify the farms where all their cocoa comes from, let alone whether child labor was used in producing it. Mars, maker of M&M’s and Milky Way, can trace only 24 percent of its cocoa back to farms; Hershey, the maker of Kisses and Reese’s, less than half; Nestlé can trace 49 percent of its global cocoa supply to farms.
“How old are you?” a Washington Post reporter asks one of the older-looking boys.
“Nineteen,” Abou Traore says in a hushed voice. Under Ivory Coast’s labor laws, that would make him legal. But as he talks, he casts nervous glances at the farmer who is overseeing his work from several steps away. When the farmer is distracted, Abou crouches and with his finger, writes a different answer in the gray sand: 15.
Then, to make sure he is understood, he also flashes 15 with his hands. He says, eventually, that he’s been working the cocoa farms in Ivory Coast since he was 10. The other four boys say they are young, too — one says he is 15, two are 14 and another, 13.
Abou says his back hurts, and he’s hungry.
“I came here to go to school,” Abou says. “I haven’t been to school for five years now.”
Crap, that doesn’t seem like it’s in the Halloween spirit.
Fortunately, there are a number of candy makers that produce their yummies with socially conscious practices. SlaveFreeChocolate.org has an extensive list of chocolatiers that only use ethically grown cocoa, and The Good Trade has a list of 10 Fair Trade Chocolate Companies For Your Conscious Cravings. Fremont’s own Theo Chocolate, which features a Halloween Treats selection, figures in that list
If spending $19 on a 12-pack of 1 oz Theo candy bars to hand away to already sugar ravaged toddlers doesn’t sound like wise spend, YumEarth sells bags of organic hard candy, or you could choose to go with Native Honey Sticks, made with nothing but 100% pure, United States wildflower honey. If you want to stick with chocolate, Tony’s Chocolonely Milk Chocolate Sea Salt Caramel comes in individually wrapped, bite-sized pieces. Amazon will deliver to Prime customers with free delivery for you procrastinators (one-day for the first two, the third may take a couple days, but can also be picked up at Whole Goods.)
As long as I’m getting preachy about what candy you hand out, I may as well mention the Teal Pumpkin project, which suggests a list of non-food treats that may help the swelling cohort of kids with food allergies feel more included. We’ve given away super balls for the last seven or eight years, and I haven’t heard a complaint yet.
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Sounds good but where are the Super Balls made? What are their labor practices? 🙂
They’re actually just old wads of gum I spit out.
They’re actually just chewed up wads of gum.
Preach on! Thanks for sharing this timely info.
This is a problem that can’t be resolved by Big Chocolate. Kids working was universal around the world, and child labor has been eradicated country by country through economic growth. In poorer communities, kids working is what it takes to survive for many. Child labor rate is high wherever the GDP per capita is very low, and chocolate is not big enough an industry itself to lift countries out of poverty. If somehow we eradicate child labor in this one industry, it just means child labor would be shifted to something else.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to punish Big Chocolate too much on this, since they are at least doing something and probably more helpful on this topic than most other parties involved.
It’s complex, alright. But if you have the choice of buying chocolate from chocolatiers that don’t use child labor, or those that do, would you really advocate saying it doesn’t matter?
It seems to me that if there is an economic incentive to grow chocolate without child labor, that is, companies are willing to pay a premium for it, it will reward and penalize companies to do the right thing.
According to this article says, regarding the Ivory Coast in 2018,
It goes on to say:
I don’t know if that will raise them out of poverty, but it’s significant.
Anyway, those Hershey and Nestle bars always taste like wax and aluminum to me.
I actually think it’s typically a bad idea to buy from small brands that charge you more by sourcing from more ethical sources. The main reason is that does little to the whole situation other than those sellers being able to extract more from consumers. It’s mostly a marketing ploy to appease those able to pay the premium. Big Chocolates are building schools in Africa, so who knows if they are actually more ethical.
A hundred years ago child labor was normal and common in the Western world. In 1880 70% of the boys age 10-15 in the US were working. Child labor isn’t something “evil” by default, just something that society move away with wealth. The barrier in Africa to wealth has mostly been in governance. There have been no lack of interest to invest more in Africa to build more factories taking advantage of the cheap labor, but the success is mostly depending on corruption and regulation. In many cases it’s cheaper to produce in places with higher labor cost but lower government-induced costs. Those will be the solution to child labor, not some chocolate buying choice in Seattle.
Make decisions on taste, not marketing ploys.