Child labour is not just the chocolate industry’s problem

There’s a dirty secret lurking behind the rich and comforting aroma of a morning coffee, the shine on gold jewellery, and the wafting smoke of a lit cigarette. “There may be a hidden ingredient in the chocolate cake you baked, the candy bars your children sold for their school fund-raiser or that fudge ripple ice cream cone you enjoyed on Saturday afternoon. Slave labor.” Thus began a sensational investigation by journalists from the Knight Ridder news agency that was splashed across newspapers in the United States on June 24, 2001. It documented how boys as young as nine from Mali were sold into slavery to work on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast that supplied beans to the American chocolate industry. The story, and the outrage it provoked in the US, prompted Congressman Eliot Engel to introduce a legislative amendment to fund the development of a ‘no child slavery’ label for chocolate products sold in the US. The House of Representatives approved his initiative by 291 votes to 115 ...