16 - Chocolate

Chocolate is another food we depend upon other countries to produce for us.

Although there is evidence that the consumption of chocolate in Canada is declining, demand for it is still increasing in the United States. Americans spend $13 billion annually on chocolate, consuming an average of 12 lbs per person per year. The British are even more fond of it, consuming an average of 17.5 lbs per person per year.

Chocolate is made from cocoa, a crop which originated in Central and South America; however, the major cocoa-exporting countries today are in West Africa. Côte d’Ivoire is the world’s largest exporter, and Ghana the second largest. Nigeria and the Cameroons are also major cocoa exporters, as is the Dominican Republic.

In both Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, cocoa is primarily grown by small hold farmers. The average cocoa farm in Ghana is only two acres. There are some 600,000 cocoa farmers in the country. But cocoa only provides these farmers a supplemental income. It is estimated that at the price they are paid for their product, it would cost a Ghanaian farmer two days work in order to purchase enough food to feed his family for a single day.

The farmers raise their own food and grow cocoa as a cash crop in order to pay for other needs. It is unlikely that those needs would include chocolate, which is far too expensive for them to be able to afford. So most cocoa farmers never taste the product for which they provide the raw material.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the farming of cocoa in Côte d’Ivoire received a lot of media scrutiny because it was associated with slavery. Because the prices earned for cocoa are so low, some of the larger plantation owners felt that the only way they could make a profit was by cutting wage costs through the use of forced labour. Thousands of young boys from the neighbouring country of Mali were sold into slavery to work the cocoa plantations of Côte d’Ivoire.

The US government has long had legislation forbidding the importation of products which have been produced—in whole or in part—by slave labor. And in 2001, there was an effort in the United States House of Representatives to require chocolate manufacturers to introduce a labelling system which would assure consumers that the products they purchased were not contributing to slave labour.

The cocoa industry successfully lobbied to have the proposed legislation stymied, but in response to public opinion they initiated the Harkin-Engel Protocol in which they pledged they would work to end child labor and forced labor in cocoa harvesting by 2005. In fact the International Labor Organization asserted that in 2005 some 200,000 children were still engaged in cocoa harvesting in Côte d’Ivoire, of whom about 6% were deemed to have been trafficked for the purposes of forced labor. In 2006 the funding for an industry sponsored “verification work group” was discontinued.

The examples of coffee, sugar and cocoa demonstrate some of the hidden costs behind the products we buy in North America–costs many people would rather not know about. But it’s only because of conditions such as these that the prices for these commodities, or items such as sportswear, remain as low as they do.