From Picking Cotton to Picking Chocolate
By:Neb Nawur Re
Many African Americans today wear t-shirts that are 100% cotton in no regard to their ancestors who were forced to pick cotton in the fields. Today we face yet another bleak reality. Many of us are chocolate lovers. We eat chocolate ice cream, chocolate cake, candies and the likes. Just the taste of some chocolates alone is enough to have the person eating the chocolate addicted. For those of you who love the taste of chocolate; I must ask how delicious would chocolate be if you knew that the chocolate that you were eating was produced as an end result of a child being enslaved to make it? Would you still eat chocolate after knowing children were enslaved to produce the very chocolate you buy so innocently at supermarkets and newsstands.
Hundreds of thousands of children are being stolen from their parents, shipped to the Ivory Coast and sold as slaves to cocoa farms. These children earn no money for their work, are barely fed, are beaten if they try to escape, and most will never see their families again. Nearly 50% of the world's chocolate production starts in the Ivory Coast. Ivory Coast is the world's biggest producer of cocoa beans with over a million cocoa farms and plantations. A British TV documentary, "Slavery," claims 90 percent of Ivory Coast cocoa plantations use slave labor. Most are young men and boys from impoverished areas in Benin, Togo and Mali. They are enticed by traffickers who promise them paid work, housing and an education. Instead, they are sold to Ivory Coast cocoa plantation owners who beat them into submission and offer no pay for grueling, 18-hour days.
Not only are children in Africa being taken advantage of but the consumers who buy most of the popular chocolate brands are also being deceived. People are buying chocolate under the pretense that the product that they are eating is chocolate when in fact, the chocolate that they are eating is mostly made of nougat and caramel, with a chocolate coating. As a matter of fact, the Snickers Bar is only about 12 percent chocolate leaving the rest of the Snickers Bar’s ingredients to be a little more than 50 percent sugar and the rest is powdered milk, vegetable fat, and flavorings. None of these ingredients are conducive to the type things the human’s digestive tract was designed to breakdown. Not only are they enslaving children to work on these plantations to make chocolate but they then stretch the chocolate as much as they can and sell it to the consumer as if it is really chocolate. This mass deception and lack of respect for human rights should not be tolerated.
What we suggest as a start, is to buying products which carry a fair trade label. By purchasing products that have fair trade labels you will be able to rest assure that the chocolate that you are eating was not made by using exploited labor. Big companies, like Nestle, purchase their cocoa on international exchanges where cocoa from Ivory Coast is mixed with cocoa from other countries and loses its identity as a slave-made product. Anti Slavery International says, "Because of the way the chocolate industry buys its cocoa it is not possible to ensure that slavery or other forms of illegal exploitation have not been used in its production." Fair trade means products are purchased directly and at a fair price from small family growers and co-operatives that do not rely on hired or illegally forced labor.
Undoubtedly, many will read this article and say, “Well I’m not going to stop eating chocolate. What do they expect me to do.” Just remember you are fortunate to live on a part of this planet where you have a decision as to whether or not you are willing to make a change. You should use it. It is said that chocolate invigorates the body, cures colds, and may even relieve people of asthma. Whether these things are true or false, the one thing that we do know is that slavery cures none of these things.
