British Journalists: Shocking Find at Cocoa Farms

Cocoa

Behind the chocolate in every Cadbury Crème Egg prowls the shadow of kid labor, according to a brand-new report. Britain’s Channel 4 discovered in a report this month that kids as young as 10 work for as much as 9 hours a day in the African country of Ghana to collect the cocoa pods that are the raw product of the chocolate for the Easter candy, according to The Sun.

“The farmers are paid so little they can’t afford to hire adults to work on the farm, so they have to use their children,” Channel 4 reporter Antony Barnett told The Sun.

“So they take them out of school to work on the farm. But there were also cases where it wasn’t children belonging to the family, but they’d been brought from elsewhere to work on the farm.”

Cadbury’s chocolate apparently is ethically sourced, Barnett stated kid labor was prevalent throughout his journey to Ghana.

“From what we saw, child labor was everywhere,” Barnett told The Sun. “We didn’t have to go looking for children working on farms – we visited four farms in 12 days, during the harvest, and found evidence of child labor on every one.

“The farms are very remote and hard to get to, so we were limited in our scope, but had we visited more farms, I believe we would have seen more. It seemed to be endemic in my view.”

Mondelez International, Cadbury’s parent business, stated they “strongly refute” accusations that they benefit from kid labor. The business, nevertheless, stated it would examine the claims.

The law in Ghana states kids under 13 can’t work, but Channel 4 stated it discovered kids younger than that working in several locations.

One woman of about 14 stated she was sent out to a cocoa farm by an Aunt who informed her she would be taking care of kids and learning to sew

“I suffer a lot when I’m farming,” explained the girl, who said she is afraid to say anything to adults.

Barnett stated he anticipated there would be some kid labor, however he was stunned at what he experienced.

“I expected to see them plucking pods or spraying pesticides, so what I found the most shocking was how involved they were in this really hazardous work,” he said.

“It was the use of the machete and these sharp knives that was really concerning. They are so young, and these machetes are over half their height, at three feet, and you see both boys and girls are hacking through the undergrowth with them.”

“It’s back-breaking work, and many of them had been injured, including one girl who badly slashed her foot but couldn’t go to the hospital because there was no money,” he said, noting that a 10-year-old girl suffered a snakebite because she works without shoes.”

Mondelez elaborated on its claim that it does not enable kid labor.

“We explicitly prohibit child labor in our operations and have been making significant efforts through our Cocoa Life program to improve the protection of children in the communities where we source cocoa. We strongly refute any allegation that Mondelez benefits from child labor, which we have relentlessly taken a stand against,” the company said in a statement.

“The welfare of the children and families featured is our primary concern and we commit to investigating further.”

According to the most recent report from the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago by means of the New York Post, approximately 1.56 million kids are associated with cocoa production in Africa in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, with 95 percent of those kids associated with harmful kid labor.

The report found that regardless of promises from chocolate companies, consisting of Cadbury, the variety of kids ages 5 to 17 who are associated with cocoa labor in Ghana in fact has actually increased from 44 percent to 55 percent since 2009.

 

Ayn Riggs, the creator of Slave Free Chocolate, called the report by Channel 4 “scary” and stated she doubted Mondelez’s statement.

“The part which really enrages me is that these chocolate companies promised to clean this up over 20 years ago. They admitted that they knew they were profiting from child labor, and they have shirked their promises not just to these children, but to everybody in the world,” she said.

“If they really wanted to stamp out child labor, there’s an easy first step that they haven’t done yet, which is paying the farmers a lot more for their beans. The money is there. But on the farms, these farmers can’t afford to replace their children with an adult laborer.”

H/T Western Journal

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