World Chocolate Day 2020

The best thing we can do is use this day to highlight some pretty nasty things that are still going on.

Paying the right price for cocoa beans and stopping child labour are things that we believe we can all agree on. But whilst we agree this is a problem it begs the question: WTF is going on and why are we still talking about this in 2020?

Lets try and break this down.

Back in Sept 2001 a protocol called Harkin-Engel was signed by 8 of the biggest chocolate manufacturers. ADM, Barry Callebaut, Guittard, World's Finest Chocolate, The Hershey Company, Blommer Chocolate, Mars, and Nestlé signed a voluntary, non-binding agreement to eliminate child labour in cocoa harvesting in West Africa by 2008. This was clearly too ambitious and as it was voluntary and non-binding, by 2008, very little was done so they got back round the table and said - Actually lets just eliminate the worst forms of child labour by 70% by 2020.

In 2018 there were an estimated 2.2 million (ICI) children farming cocoa in West Africa - TWO THOUSAND AND EIGHTEEN!

In 2012 the US department of Labor found that most children working on cocoa farms were between 12 and 16 but there were times that there were children as young as 5 working on the farms! (1)

We know most of the world's cocoa is grown in West Africa with the Ivory Coast generating 2.1 million tonnes in 2019/2020(Statista.com)

A typical farmer can earn a poverty wage of $1000 a year(1). So for all the hard backbreaking work farmers do, some people thought the best pay was a poverty pay of $1000 a year, knowing that the farmers don't have the power to negotiate. This spirals, you don't pay right, you can't hire people and some resort to slave labour of children to meet the demand for the biggest chocolate manufacturers. All of these companies, no matter what their ambitions, right now have children in their supply chain.

What this also highlights is that Governments, organisations like Fair Trade and Rainforest Alliance aren't making the impact that they set out to do. Farmers are still living in poverty - Rainforest Alliance have increased their price per tonne to $2600 per tonne and Fairtrade have increased their price per tonne from $2000 to $2400 but this still doesn't touch the sides of farmers poverty and is over $1000 less than what Fairtrade say would be a living wage - Which begs the question, if they know what they should be paying...Why are they not paying it?! FFS

It's so frustrating just writing this because this is all a question of motivation...

This is why we always urge people never to use these badges as a sign of how ethical a brand is. You have to ask your chocolate companies questions about their cocoa.

Demand More From Your Chocolate

So when we get questions like "Why are your bars so expensive..." our response is that really you want to be asking the manufacturers of the bars that you think are priced correctly why they are so cheap.

(1) Sadler Lawrence L. (2019) The Spoiled Supply Chain of Child Labor. In: Winterdyk J., Jones J. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Human Trafficking. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham--