Date of publication: October 28, 2010
Source: STLToday.com
Author: Charita L. Castro and Jialan Wang
By Charita L. Castro and Jialan Wang
...Indeed, few products are more evocative of the joy and innocence of American childhood than the iconic Hershey bar. On our recent visit to a neighborhood café, the proprietor expressed her homespun values by saying she didn't use fancy foreign chocolate in her cookies, just good old American Hershey's. But while the brand may be all-American, the humble Hershey bar begins its life as cocoa beans, the seeds of a tropical tree known as Theobroma Cacao, about 70 percent of which comes from the West African nations of Ghana and Ivory Coast, where children are more likely to face hunger and malnutrition than enjoy the taste of a chocolate bar.
...At least 2 million children currently are involved in the production of cocoa in Ghana and the Ivory Cost. Children as young as 5 work instead of attending school, and they handle dangerous agrochemicals, wield machetes to hack open cocoa pods and carry backbreaking loads. Even worse, there is evidence that children from Mali and Togo are trafficked into forced labor to work on the cocoa farms of the Ivory Coast...