For many of my friends, Halloweekend was the most anticipated time of the year. The festival of frights on the last day of October is preceded by nightly parties where it is perfectly normal to see a zombie joking and laughing with Harley Quinn while Bob from "Bob’s Burgers" brings everyone drinks. But Halloween is not only about partying or dressing up, it’s also about candy. Specifically, chocolate.
Chocolate is by far America’s favorite sweet, representing half of the overall candy consumption in the United States every year. On Halloween alone, we spend more than $1 billion on chocolate. Children across the country move from house to house, ringing doorbells and selecting from heaps of Snickers, Kit-Kats, Hershey Bars and Twix. The next house might have Milky Way and Three Musketeers, and across the street you can get M&M’s and Reese’s Cups. Chocolate is so ingrained in the American lifestyle that it would be strange to not see 20 different candy bars at the cash register at stores. It’s so common that we hardly ever stop to think about where all of this chocolate could possibly come from, but we definitely should.
West Africa produces 70 percent of all the cocoa in the world, with the countries of Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire bearing the lion’s share of the production burden. Meeting the global demand for chocolate recently has become increasingly difficult given the economic rise of China and India. These challenges have led to an expansion of a practice that has plagued the industry for decades: child slavery.
Farmers are expected to keep the prices for cocoa beans low, and this drives many farmers to resort to free child labor to keep their prices competitive. Children ages 12-16 are abducted, coerced or sold into slavery by their own relatives and sent to cocoa farms to harvest America’s favorite sweet. The work itself is brutal. The children climb trees carrying machetes that they use to chop down the cocoa beans. Once on the ground, they use the blades to split open the outer shell of the beans while risking personal injury with every swing. Kids level trees with chainsaws while others spray crops with toxic chemicals without protective clothing. Most of these kids are paid nothing and live in deplorable conditions. All of this just to produce cheap chocolate for the rest of the world to eat.
You may be asking yourself how this could be allowed to happen for more than a decade. Surely the big chocolate companies like Nestle, Hershey, Mars and Godiva — who all buy their chocolate from these farms — would be accountable for these practices, right? Well, the FDA attempted to pass legislation in 2001 to include the label of "slave free" on chocolate packages but the companies successfully thwarted the effort by promising to decrease the practice themselves by 70 percent by the year 2005. Fifteen years later, results have been negligible. The deadline for their resolution moved multiple times, currently at 2020. Recently, 10 of the biggest companies came together to form the CocoaAction plan, an ambitious $500 million initiative to try and curtail child labor. To the dismay of many, the plan’s success has been marginal — by some metrics, the situation has even worsened since its implementation.
Imagining a life without chocolate is difficult. I love chocolate. Most Americans do. But our love for something sweet has created an industry built on backs of child slaves to meet low price demands. Boycotting chocolate seems like the natural response to a situation like this. But is it reasonable to expect all of America to stop their chocolate consumption overnight? It would cripple not only the companies who make the chocolate but the economies of West Africa throwing its citizens into worse poverty than they already face. The situation is complex, but without a doubt child labor needs to stop.
I, for one, would be willing to pay more for my chocolate if it meant that farmers could be paid reasonably and children did not have to harvest the beans. For children in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, Halloween is not artificially scary. The terror is real.