Date of publication: March 28, 2007
Source: San Diego City Beat
Author: D.A. Kolodenko
.... “Hey kid, do you speak English?" “Yes, sir." “Are you a slave, or what?" “Yes, sir. I was kidnapped from my home country of Mali. I work 14 hours a day; they beat me and won't let me go." “What are you picking?" “Cocoa, sir."
Aha, I've figured out where we are. We're in West Africa's Ivory Coast, the world's largest cocoa producer. I think it's 2001, the year the U.S. State Department reported that child slavery was rampant on cocoa farms here. Or maybe 2002, the year a report from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture estimated there were 284,000 children working on cocoa farms in hazardous conditions, many of them slaves. This was the year I started buying fair-trade chocolate, since commercial chocolate like Hershey's and M&M/Mars products were made with slave-produced cocoa...
Write to dak@SDcitybeat.com [1] and editor@SDcitybeat.com [2].