Forty-five percent of the chocolate we consume in the
United States and in the rest of the world is made from cocoa
beans grown and harvested on farms in the Ivory Coast,
a small nation on the western coast of Africa. Few realize
that a portion of the Ivory Coast cocoa beans that goes into
the chocolate we eat was grown and harvested by slave children.
The slaves are boys between 12 and 16—but sometimes
as young as 9—who are kidnapped from villages in
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ETHICS AND BUSINESS 65
surrounding nations and sold to the cocoa farmers by traffickers.
The farmers whip, beat, and starve the boys to force
them to do the hot, difficult work of clearing the fields,
harvesting the beans, and drying them in the sun. The boys
work from sunrise to sunset. Some are locked in at night in
windowless rooms where they sleep on bare wooden planks.
Far from home, unsure of their location, unable to speak the
language, isolated in rural areas, and threatened with harsh
beatings if they try to get away, the boys rarely attempt to
escape their nightmare situation. Those who do try are usually
caught, severely beaten as an example to others, and
then locked in solitary confinement. Every year unknown
numbers of these boys die or are killed on the cocoa farms
that supply our chocolate.
The plight of the enslaved children was first widely
publicized at the turn of the twenty-first century when
True Vision, a British television company, took videos
of slave boys working on Ivory Coast farms and made a
documentary depicting the sufferings of the boys. In September
2000, the documentary was broadcast in Great
Britain, the United States, and other parts of the world.
The U.S. State Department, in its Year 2001 Human
Rights Report , estimated that about 15,000 children from
the neighboring nations of Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali,
and Togo had been sold into slavery to labor on Ivory
Coast farms. The International Labor Organization reported
on June 11, 2001 that child slavery was indeed
“widespread” in Ivory Coast and a Knight-Ridder newspaper
investigation published on June 24, 2001 corroborated
the use of slave boys on Ivory Coast cocoa farms.
In 2006, The New York Times reported that child slavery
continued to be a problem in West Africa. In 2007, BBC
News published several stories on the “thousands” of children
who were still working as slaves on cocoa farms in
Ivory Coast. Fortune Magazine in 2008 reported that slavery
in the Ivory Coast was still a continuing problem, and
a BBC documentary entitled Chocolate: The Bitter Truth ,
broadcast on March 24, 2010, a decade after the use of
slave boys in the chocolate industry was first revealed,
showed young boys were still being used as slaves on the
cocoa farms of the Ivory Coast.
Although slavery is illegal in the Ivory Coast, the
law is poorly enforced. Open borders, a shortage of enforcement
officers, and the willingness of local officials to
accept bribes from people trafficking in slaves, all contribute
to the problem. In addition, prices for cocoa beans in
global markets have been depressed most years since 1996.
As prices declined, the already impoverished cocoa farmers
turned to slavery to cut their labor costs. Although prices
began to improve during the early years of the twenty-first
century, cocoa prices fell again in 2004 and remained low
until the summer of 2010 when they again began to rise.
The poverty that motivated many Ivory Coast cocoa
farmers to buy children trafficked as slaves was aggravated
by other factors besides low cocoa prices. Working on isolated
farms, cocoa farmers cannot communicate among
themselves nor with the outside world to learn what cocoa
is selling for. Consequently they are at the mercy of local
middlemen who drive out to the farms, buy the farmers’
cocoa for half of its current market price, and haul it away
in their trucks. Unable to afford trucks themselves, the
farmers must rely on the middlemen to get their cocoa to
market.
Chocolate is a $13 billion industry in the United
States which consumes 3.1 billion pounds each year. The
names of the four largest U.S. chocolate manufacturers—
all of whom use the morally “tainted” cocoa beans from the
Ivory Coast in their products—are well known: Hershey
Foods Corp. (maker of Hershey’s milk chocolate, Reeses,
and Almond Joy), M&M Mars, Inc. (maker of M&Ms,
Mars, Twix, Dove, and Milky Ways), Nestlé USA, (maker
of Nestlé Crunch, Kit Kat, Baby Ruth, and Butterfingers),
and Kraft Foods (which also uses chocolate in its baking
and breakfast products). Less well known, but a key part
of the industry, are the names of Archer Daniels Midland
Co., Barry Callebaut, and Cargill Inc., all of whom serve as
middlemen who buy the beans from the Ivory Coast, grind
and process them, and then sell the processed cocoa to the
chocolate manufacturers.
While all the major chocolate companies used beans
from Ivory Coast farms, a portion of which relied on
the labor of enslaved children, many smaller companies
avoided using chocolate made from Ivory Coast beans and
instead turned to using chocolate processed from “untainted”
beans grown in other parts of the world. These
companies include: Clif Bar, Cloud Nine, Dagoba Organic
Chocolate, Denman Island Chocolate, Gardners Candies,
Green and Black’s, Kailua Candy Company, Koppers
Chocolate, L.A. Burdick Chocolates, Montezuma’s Chocolates,
Newman’s Own Organics, Omanhene Cocoa Bean
Company, Rapunzel Pure Organics, and The Endangered
Species Chocolate Company. Other small companies
turned to using fair trade chocolate and organic chocolate
because these are made from beans grown on farms that
are regularly monitored and so they, too, are made from
untainted beans.
That many farmers in the Ivory Coast use slave boys
to farm their cocoa beans was already known to American
chocolate-makers when media reports first began publicizing
the issue. In 2001, the Chocolate Manufacturers
Association, a trade group of U.S. chocolate manufacturers
(whose members include Hershey, Mars, Nestlé, and
others), admitted to newspapers that they had been aware
of the use of slave boys on Ivory Coast cocoa farms for
some time. Pressured by various antislavery groups, the
Chocolate Manufacturers Association stated on June 22,
2001 that it “condemned” “these practices” and agreed to
fund a “study” of the situation.
66 BASIC PRINCIPLES
On June 28, 2001, U.S. Representative Eliot Engel
sponsored a bill aimed at setting up a labeling system
that would inform consumers whether the chocolate they
were buying was “slavefree,” i.e., guaranteed not to have
been produced by slave children. The measure passed the
House of Representatives by a vote of 291 to115. Before
a measure can become law, however, both the House of
Representatives and the Senate must approve it. U.S.
Senator Tom Harkin therefore prepared to introduce the
same bill in the Senate. Before the Senate could consider
the bill, the U.S. chocolate industry—led by Mars, Hershey,
Kraft Foods and Archer Daniels Midland and with
the help of lobbyists Bob Dole and George Mitchell—
mounted a major lobbying effort to fight the “slave-free”
labeling system. The companies argued that a labeling system
would not only hurt their own sales, but in the long
run could hurt poor African cocoa farmers by reducing
their sales and lowering the price of cocoa which would
add to the very pressures that led them to use slave labor
in the first place. As a result of the industry’s lobbying,
the “slave-free” labeling bill was never approved by the
Senate. Nevertheless, Representative Engel and Senator
Harkin threatened to introduce a new bill that would prohibit
the import of cocoa produced by slave labor, unless
the chocolate companies voluntarily eliminated slave labor
from their production chains.
On October 1, 2001, the members of the Chocolate
Manufacturers Association and the World Cocoa
Foundation, caught in the spotlight of media attention,
announced that they intended to put in place a system
that would eliminate “the worse forms of child labor” including
slavery. In spring of 2002, the Chocolate Manufacturers
Association and the World Cocoa Foundation
as well as the major chocolate producers—Hershey’s,
M&M Mars, Nestle, and World’s Finest Chocolate—and
the major cocoa processors—Blommer Chocolate, Guittard
Chocolate, Barry Callebaut, and Archer Daniels
Midland—all signed an agreement to establish a system
of certification that would verify and certify that the
cocoa beans they used were not produced by the use of
child slaves. Known as the “Harkin-Engel Protocol,”
the agreement also said the chocolate companies would
fund training programs for cocoa bean farmers to educate
them about growing techniques while explaining the importance
of avoiding the use of slave labor. The members
of the Chocolate Manufacturers Association also agreed
to “investigate” conditions on the cocoa farms and establish
an “international foundation” that could “oversee and
sustain efforts” to eliminate child slavery on cocoa farms.
In July, 2002, the first survey sponsored by the Chocolate
Manufacturers Association concluded that some 200,000
children—not all of them slaves—were working in hazardous
conditions on cocoa farms and that most of them
did not attend school.
Unfortunately, in 2002, Ivory Coast became
embroiled in a civil war that continued until an uneasy
peace was established in 2005 and finalized in 2007; rebel
forces, however, continued to control the northern half
of the country. Reports claimed that much of the money
funding the violence of both the government and rebel
groups during these years came from sales of cocoa, and
that buyers of “blood chocolate” from Ivory Coast were
supporting this violence.
The 2005 deadline the major chocolate companies
and their associations had set, came, and passed without the
promised establishment of a certification system to ensure
beans were not being produced by slave children. At this
point, the chocolate companies amended the protocol to
give themselves more time by extending their own deadline
to July, 2008, saying that the certification process had
turned out to be more difficult than they thought it would,
particularly with the outbreak of a civil war. Although the
companies did not establish a certification system while
the civil war raged, however, they did manage to secure
enough cocoa beans to keep their chocolate factories going
at full speed throughout the war.
By early 2008, the companies had still not started
work on establishing a certification system or any other
method of ensuring that slave labor was not used to produce
the cocoa beans they used. The companies issued a
new statement in which they extended to 2010 the deadline
for complying with their promise to establish a certification
system. According to the companies, they had
been investing several million dollars a year into a foundation
that was working on the problem of child labor.
However, an investigative reporter, in an article published
in Fortune Magazine on February 15, 2008, found the
foundation had only one staff member working in Ivory
Coast. The activities of the staff member were limited
to giving “sensitization” workshops to local people during
which he would explain that child labor is a bad thing.
The foundation was also helping a shelter that provided
housing and education to homeless street children. The
reporter found no signs of work being done on a certification
system. By now the monitoring systems used in
the fair trade and organic parts of the industry had been
functioning for several years, yet the larger companies operating
in Ivory Coast seemed unable or uninterested in
learning from their example.
The existence of a large and well-organized system
for trafficking children from surrounding countries onto
Ivory Coast farms was once against demonstrated on June
18, 2009. On that date INTERPOL, the international
police organization, carried out a series of raids of several
farms believed to harbor slave children and managed to
rescue 54 children. Aged between 11 and 16, the children
had been working 12 hours a day for no salary; many were
regularly beaten and none had received any schooling. In
ETHICS AND BUSINESS 67
a public statement, INTERPOL estimated that “ hundreds
of thousands of children are working illegally in the
plantations.”
On September 30, 2010, the Payson Center at
Tulane University issued a report on the progress that
had been made on the certification system the chocolate
industry in 2002 had promised to establish, as well
as on the progress the industry had made regarding its
promise to eliminate “the worse forms of child labor,”
including child slavery, on the farms from which the industry
sourced its cocoa. The report was commissioned
by the United States Department of Labor who had been
asked by Congress to assess progress on the “Harkin-
Engel Protocol,” and who gave Tulane University an
initial grant of $4.3 million in 2006, and an additional
$1.2 million in 2009 to compile the report. According to
the report, “Industry is still far from achieving its target
to have a sector-wide independently verified certification
process fully in place . . . by the end of 2010.” The
report found that between 2002—the date of the original
agreement—and September 2010, the Industry had
managed to contact only about 95 (2.3 percent) of Ivory
Coast’s cocoa farming communities, and that to complete
its “remediation efforts” it would have to contact an additional
3,655 farm communities. While the Tulane group
“confirmed” that forced labor was being used on the cocoa
farms, it also found that no industry efforts to “remediate”
the use of forced labor “are in place.”
Not surprisingly, the problem of certification still
remained unresolved in 2011. After the media attention
had died down, the manufacturers and distributors buying
Ivory Coast cocoa beans seemed incapable of finding
a way to “certify” that slavery was not used to harvest
the beans they purchased. Representatives of the chocolate
companies argued that the problem of certification
was difficult because there are more than 600,000 cocoa
farms in Ivory Coast; most of them small family farms
located in remote rural regions that are difficult to reach
and that lack good roads and other infrastructure. Critics,
however, pointed out that these difficulties did not seem
to pose any obstacles to obtaining beans from these many
scattered cocoa farms. Cocoa bean farmers, poor and buffeted
by the low price of cocoa beans, continued to use enslaved
children although they were secretive about it. To
make matters worse, on February 2011, fighting between
the rebels in the north and the Ivory Coast government
in the south again broke out for a brief period in a dispute
over who was the legitimate winner of the 2010 presidential
election. The fighting ended in April 2011 when one
of the candidates finally conceded the election, allowing
Allassane Ouattara to be declared the legitimate president.
In 2010 another film, this one entitled The Dark
Side of Chocolate, once more documented the continuing
use of enslaved children on Ivory Coast farms, although
representatives of the chocolate companies interviewed
in the film denied the problem or claimed they did not
know anything about it. The beans tainted by the labor
of slave boys are therefore still being quietly mixed together
in bins and warehouses with beans harvested by
free paid workers, so that the two are indistinguishable.
From there they still make their way into the now
tainted chocolate candies that Hershey’s, M&M Mars,
Nestle and Kraft Foods make and that we buy here and
in Europe. Without an effective system of certification, in
fact, virtually all the chocolate we eat that is made from
West African (Ivory Coast and Ghana) cocoa contains a
portion of tainted chocolate made from beans harvested
by enslaved children.
Questions
1. What are the systemic, corporate, and individual
ethical issues raised by this case?
2. In your view, is the kind of child slavery discussed in
this case absolutely wrong no matter what, or is it only
relatively wrong, i.e., if one happens to live in a society
(like ours) that disapproves of child slavery? Explain
your view and why you hold it.
3. Who shares in the moral responsibility for the slavery
occurring in the chocolate industry?
4. Consider the bill that Representive Engle and Senator
Harkin attempted to enact into a law, but which
never became a law because of the lobbying efforts
of the chocolate companies. What does this incident
show about the view that “to be ethical it is enough for
businesspeople to follow the law”?
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