Chocolate is a luxury many of us enjoy quite a lot. For years,
I’ve been making a concerted effort to buy ‘Fair Trade
Certified’ chocolate, coffee, tea and sugar with the aim of
ensuring that producers around the world get a fair wage for the
products they grow. Thus, you can imagine my horror when I found
out that buying ‘Fair Trade’ chocolate does not guarantee that
child labor and/or child slavery was not used in the cacao
farming (to be clear, ‘fair trade’ certifiers do not endorse
slavery—because of the difficulty of determining whether or not
slavery is used, it has been found in certain fair trade farms
and they have worked to remedy this situation). According to the
Food Empowerment Project’s efforts to compile research on the
subject, the overwhelming majority of cacao (cocoa) production
occurs in Ghana and the Ivory Coast (in the region of West
Africa). Investigative journalists and human rights
investigators have discovered that child labor and, more
specifically, child slavery are rampant in this