"Chocolate for children..."

A lot of children works in the world, even if every child who work is a serious problem, some examples are more impressive than others, these can help us to understand how complex this problem can be, and realize that in a lot of situations child labour is just an element of a huge mechanism. And at the end of this mechanism we can often find people like me or you : consumers…

Children like chocolate and it is well known that chocolate brings joy to them… but on the other side of the earth the situation is totally different, some children don’t know the chocolate as a delicious dish but as an object of torture and as an obstacle to their rights of children. Even if “torture” is quite a violent word, it is the best word to describe what they suffer (physical and psychological injuries).

Let’s see some numbers which help us to understand the extent of this problem. In 2001, some us organisations ( governmental and non governmental) underlined this phenomenon. According to theirs results more than 100.000 children work in chocolate production in Ivory Coast ( which is the bigger cocoa producer with a part of 43% in the world production).

After a period of great mediatisation of this problem and the pressure of public opinion, a compromise was signed by some us chocolate companies to eradicate this kind of practices by 2005 ( via the Harken-Engel Protocol )…
But two years later, the problem hasn’t been solved. In the bigger chocolate producers countries like Ivory Coast or like Ghana , child slave labour is still an important phenomenon…

To go into detail of this problem please visit :

http://www.american.edu/ted/chocolate-slave.htm