Case Study: Slavery in the Chocolate Industry-
Close to half of the world's chocolate is made from highly prized top-quality cocoa beans that are grown in the farms in the Ivory Coast and Ghana, a small nation on the Western side of Africa. The farmers of these poor nations are notorious, however for sometimes relying on slaves to harvest their beans. The slave are boys between 12 and 16 , sometimes as young as 9-- who are kidnapped from villages in surrounding nations and sold to cocoa farmers, who use whippings, beatings, and starvation to force the boys to do the hot, difficult work of clearing the fields, harvesting the beans and drying them in the sun. The boys work from sunrise to sunset and are locked in windowless rooms where they sleep in bare wooden planks. Far from home, unsure of their location, unable to speak the language, isolated in rural areas and threatened with harsh beatings if they try to get away, the boys rarely attempt to escape their nightmare situation. Those who do try are severely beaten as an example to others and then locked in solitary confinement for a prolonged period of time. Every year an unknown number of boys die or are killed on the cocoa farms of the Ivory Coast and Ghana.
The plight of the enslaved children was publized around the world in September 2000 when True Vision, a British television company, took video on slave boys on several ivory. Coast farms and broadcast a documentary in Britain and the United Sates. An erlier 1998 report of the United Nations Children’s Fund had conclude that many Iory Coast farmers used slaves and the U.S. State Department in its Year 2000 Human Rights Report estimated that in recent years ov3er 15000 children from the neighboring nations of Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Togo had ben sold into slavery in the Ivory Coast. A Knight Ridder newspaper investigation published on June 24, 2001