Bitter Sweet Chocolate from Ivory Coast

Introduction
People love chocolate. We also know that chocolate is associated to love or affection. Chocolate also means profitable business to big chocolate industries. Chocolate is $13 billion industry in the United States.1 The names of the four largest U.S. chocolate manufacturers are well known: Hershey Foods Corp, Mars, Inc., NestleUSA, and Kraft Foods. However, these companies use cocoa beans from the Ivory Coast in their products. The farmers of these poor nations relies on children slaves to harvest chocolate bean. The U.S. State Department, in its Year 2000 Human Rights Report, estimated that in recent years over 15,000 children from neighboring nations of Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali and Togo had been sold into slavery in the Ivory Coast. Objective of this paper is to analyze what is the systemic, corporate and individual issue rose in this case. Then we will also examine who share the moral responsibility for slavery occurring in the chocolate industry.

Cocoa in Ivory Coast

Ivory Coast is the world's largest cocoa producer. It produce around a third of the world's supply of what is the essential ingredient in chocolate. There are about 600,000 cocoa farms in this country. Ivory Coast has historically been dependent on commodity exports, such as coffee, timber, or cocoa. Cocoa first appeared in Ivory Coast in 1880 on a plantation. Initially only the Europeans owned cocoa plantations there until World War I. In the latter of the 1970's, cocoa

Velasques, Manuel G (2006), Business Ethics: Concepts and Cases, New Jersey: Pearson Education. page 52.

has been entrenched in the economy. It is influenced by the offering of various price incentives to the farmers. Then, many farmers began to be dependent on cocoa for their livelihood. At present, a substantial one-third of the Ivorian economy is based on cocoa exports, which has meant continued dependence on the world market prices for cocoa. The profitability of cocoa depends on world prices that farmers' cannot control and also on natural conditions that affect cocoa yields. Since 1996 the price for a pound of cocoa beans has dropped from sixty-four cents to fifty-one cents. Consequently this negatively affects the farmers as they get less profits, so then they look for ways to cut costs by using cheap labor, driving them to even resort to use slave labor (Child Labor Coalition).

Slavery in Chocolate Farm

Sadly, farmers of Ivory Coast rely on slaves to harvest their beans. The slaves are boys between 12 and 16 years old. Most of them are kidnapped from villages in surrounding African country and sold to the farmers. These farmers dare to use whippings, beating, and starvation to force boys to do the difficult work in the field. Their jobs are harvesting the beans, clearing the fields, and drying the bean in the sun. Every year, an unknown number of boys die or are killed on the cocoa farms in Ivory Coast. Even this case is clearly has broken freedom rights of the children, the law is rarely enforced. Open borders, a shortage of enforcement officers, and the willingness of local officials to accept bribes from members of the slave trade, all contribute to the problem.2

Company and Publics Action

In 2001, the Chocolate Manufacturers association, a trade group of American chocolate manufacturers admitted to newspapers that they were aware of the use of slave boys on Ivoty Coast cocoa farms. Then on the following year, after big pressure from public, World Cocoa Foundation with several human rights groups, and the Ivory Coast government signed

Ibid.

Memorandum of Cooperation in which they agreed to work toward ending the use of child slaves in Ivory Coast. These parties also agreed to establish a system of certification. This is used as a tool to verify and certify that the beans are free from child slavery. However, this agreement has not solved the problem. Since reports of child labor and slavery in Ivory Coast - the world's largest cocoa producer - first emerged; progress in eradicating child labor has been slow.3

Ryan, Orla (2007). Labouring for chocolate. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6575713.stm. Downloaded at July 15, 2011.