You do like chocolate ? (32)

West African child labour still feeds the world's insatiable hunger for chocolate

The Children which are being forced to work on cocoa farms in west Africa , they never get a chocolate bunny for Eastern, be sure.!!

The Ivory Coast - is the country that produces half the world's chocolate - children carrying cocoa machetes are a common sight. They are kept out of school and many have untreated wounds on their legs. "I used to go to school," said Marc Yao Kwame, who works with his brother Fabrice on a remote farm. "But my father has no one to work on the farm, so he took me out of school. My mother's a long way from here. I haven't seen her for 10 years - since I was two years old.
The Companies try to get best prices and treat Cocoa like a commodity, but meanwhile, Marc, Fabrice and thousands of other children continue to work on the cocoa farms - the impoverished end of a business chain that earns billions of pounds a year.

i suppose we are talking about the end trade to the likes of Nestles , Rowntree Mcentosh, Mars etc ????...there are only a hand full of multinational names that own the choclate industries....

I have seen a documentary recently about the cocoa trade and it was heartbreaking, in the end when the film team gave to this children their very first bite of the final product "a piece of chocolate" which would cost them normally a ONE WEEKS PAY !!

I am think we are really too unconciouse about how we finance our wealth and how unequal the distribution in this world is !

At least when buing "Fair Trade Products" one does something for the conciance yes I am cynical !

I appreciate your point, but the fact remains that Child labour is rampant across the whole world. China, India, Thailand, Malaysia have also been, at some point in time, accused of this.

Anything you buy, from chocolate to electronics, from coffee to textiles, might have been picked, made or assembled by a child forced to work.

At the end of the day you will find that it is the multinational companies (some of them European) that have brought this state of affairs.

Most of these companies are accountable to their shareholders, who at the end of the year, want their dividends.

This is a known fact, but the questions are: Where do you break the chain? And what will be the consequences of breaking the chain?

Will you stop eating chocolate? Will you stop drinking coffee? Or tea? Or soft drinks? Or Juices? Will you stop buying clothes made from textiles woven by children? Will you stop buying shoes? Will you stop buying electrical or electronic products that might have been assembled by a child? The list goes on.

*looking at watch* I realize now, that the only man who got anything done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe.

At the risk of sounding very cruel it is a simple case of supply and demand. We in the western world demand goods of the highest quality at the lowest price. Any business only exists to make money. Therefore said company will use the cheapest workforce that it can find. Nothing is manufactured in England any more because the workforce costs too much. There will always be an impoverished nation whose people will work hard for what we would consider a pittance. But remember that to them this pittance may well be a fortune.

The Ivory coast Government can form a regulatory body controlling production and pricing of cocoa with other cocoa producing countries , dictating an acceptable price for cocoa , spending the revenue on vital services .. My guess is that they are paid a fraction of such money as bribe to keep the issue off the agenda . It is for the people of Ivory Coast to sort out their problems .

There are many reasons why we may be told that this is an unavoidable situation which we have to accept - people invoke economics, politics, history, terms of trade and so on ad nauseum. But the plain fact is that this cannot be acceptable; should not be acceptable and someway must be found to stop this cruel exploitation!

I dont know how but if more people know about it, talk about it and eventually move against it - even if in an inefficient bumbling way - then one day change will come about.

But meanwhile it is impossible to allow the brainwashing mechanism to start which aims to show how inevitable and unavoidable it is and best be left alone and forgotten.

If there is nothing else one can do, one can still stand up and say NO! I DO NOT ACCEPT!

Thank you Hifi for bringing some thought and humanity to these pages.

You can do your bit, but if everybody else is not with you then this WILL continue.