ALY DIABATE WAS 12 YEARS OLD
and 4 feet tall when he was sold into slavery on a chocolate plantation in the West African nation of Ivory Coast. He worked from dawn to dusk, fast and hard, to avoid beatings and torture. At the end of the day, two other boys would help load a bag atop his head, and he would stagger to a warehouse. After dinners of burned bananas and yams, he would be locked in a stifling room to try to sleep on a wooden pallet. He did this every day for 18 months. He has never tasted chocolate.
When he was finally freed, Aly went back to his village and was paid about $180 for his 18 months of servitude. When he was interviewed recently by a reporter for Knight-Ridder newspapers, and was told that American children spend an average of $60 a year on chocolate, this was his response:
"I bless them because they are eating it."
The United Nations estimates that some 250,000 children are in slavery, most of them in West African nations, many of them on the chocolate plantations of Ivory Coast, which produces 43 per cent of the world's supply of cocoa beans.
In an important series of articles, the Knight-Ridder papers revealed that Ivory Coast beans go into the world's chocolate pipeline and emerge as M&Ms, Butterfingers, Nestle's Quik, Godiva chocolates, and thousands of other products.
Americans spend $13 billion a year on chocolate and eat an average of about 12 pounds apiece. The awful irony of American children eating chocolate produced by African slave children is too much to ignore, and yet the obvious response -- a boycott of Ivory Coast chocolate -- may be the wrong solution.
Experts say a boycott would only hurt the very people it would be intended to help. Prices would be driven down, causing farmers to pay their labour even less, tempting others to employ slaves. The difference between slave labour and paid labour is often less than a dollar a day.
A better solution would be diplomatic pressure, directed through members of Congress and the State Department, toward nations that don't do enough to police child labour standards.
Public pressure can be directed at chocolate companies, either directly or through the industry's trade group, the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, 7900 Westpark Drive, Suite A-320, McLean, VA 22102. The phone number is 703-790-5011; the fax number is 703-790-5752. The industry should adopt fair trade agreements, buying only from suppliers who pay just wages.
Fair trade chocolate might cost a few cents more, but imagine how much sweeter it would be.
Published 28 June 2001 in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
(C) 2001 St. Louis Post-Dispatch. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved
Related site: Chocolate Manufacturers Association, http://www.candyusa.org/who_cma.html