At the turn of the century, a documentary called "Slavery: A Global Investigation" released detailing slave labor in our everyday lives. It revealed that chocolate brands that you probably buy from like Hershey's, Nestle, Kraft, and Mars get a lot of their chocolate from farms in Western Africa. Countries in Western Africa provide over 70 percent of the world's chocolate. These farmers live in poverty, making roughly less than two dollars a day. Since farming the cocoa bean is very difficult but also a very very large export, these farmers employ children as young as 5 years old to help them.
Oh, sorry, I got that wrong. They kidnap and torture children as young as 5 into growing cocoa beans. They enslave children hardly old enough to lose their baby teeth and whip them when they don't lift bags of cocoa beans heavier than 100 pounds fast enough. The chocolate you eat is brought to you from children who are kidnapped and tortured. If that wasn't bad enough, the process of getting these beans is very dangerous and requires the use of heavy equipment. So, yes, children are being kidnapped, tortured, and killed for your bag of Hershey's Kisses.
As soon as this documentary was released, legislation was made to require all brands to label whether or not their products were made "slave free." The chocolate industry stepped in and prevented this from happening, claiming that they would regulate and eliminate the blatant human rights violations by the year 2005.
They did nothing. It was a lie. They pledged $2 million into investigations and then didn't bother to lift a single finger to stop any of it. The year 2005 came and went, and they did absolutely nothing to stop these practices. They knowingly and willingly funded human trafficking of African children. The deadline was extended to 2008, and still they did absolutely nothing to remedy the situation. It's 2015, the child slave labor in Western Africa has increased and still they say something along the lines of "there's nothing we can do about it!"
Except they can. It has a very simple solution. They can just not buy from these cocoa farms and switch to fair trade chocolate like many other companies have but they refuse to under the excuse that their companies are too big. That didn't stop large companies like Ben & Jerry and Cadbury Dairy Milk from switching over to ensure that their chocolate was not made from tortured children. What has Hershey done? Release a statement pretending like they're doing something about it while not actually addressing the issue at all.
To be fair, they have state that by 2020 they'll be switching to fair trade chocolate, which means that the people growing the cocoa have to comply with a list of restrictions and regulations. Whether or not they're lying again while maintaining their agenda of paying people to enslave, torture, and murder children is yet to be seen. And that's just Hershey, other companies such as Nestle, Kraft, and Mars have yet to make the very necessary switch.
With the holiday season upon us and the selling of chocolates and sweets preparing to rise for the month, it's safe to say that we'll be eating a lot of chocolate. I'm not going to sit here and try to guilt you into buying from more ethical companies (any more than I already have) but I want you to keep in mind the atrocities happening to very young children who had to be enslaved in order to get it to the U.S. It's a problem that's very fixable, but large companies refuse to do anything about it all the while smiling and telling you that they're doing everything they can.
I don't know about you, but this year I'm staying away from these child killers.
