About two-thirds of the world’s cocoa supply comes from West Africa where, according to a 2015 U.S. Labor Department report, more than 2 million children were engaged in dangerous labor in cocoa-growing regions.

When asked this spring, representatives of some of the biggest and best-known brands — Hershey, Mars and Nestlé — could not guarantee that any of their chocolates were produced without child labor.

“I’m not going to make those claims,” an executive at one of the large chocolate companies said.

One reason is that nearly 20 years after pledging to eradicate child labor, chocolate companies still cannot identify the farms where all their cocoa comes from, let alone whether child labor was used in producing it. Mars, maker of M&M’s and Milky Way, can trace only 24 percent of its cocoa back to farms; Hershey, the maker of Kisses and Reese’s, less than half; Nestlé can trace 49 percent of its global cocoa supply to farms.

We are working hand in hand with government, civil society and other industry members to protect the rights of children in the cocoa sector. We are committed to eradicating child labour in our cocoa supply chain and have developed a strategic action plan to deliver and demonstrate this by 2025. To that end, we have implemented a range of activities within our cocoa supply chain to identify and protect children at risk. We tackle root causes such as poverty in cocoa-growing communities, lack of awareness and education, and insufficient economic opportunities. By designing and deploying programs that help improve the livelihoods of cocoa farmers and their communities, we are taking a coordinated, multi-sectoral approach to addressing this complex issue. More information about our efforts and commitment to sustainable and responsible cocoa is available on our website at https://www.cargill.com/sustainability/cocoa/protecting-children.     

While the original promise called for the eradication of child labor in West African cocoa fields and set a deadline for 2005, next year’s goal calls only for its reduction by 70 percent.

Timothy S. McCoy, a vice president of the World Cocoa Foundation, a Washington-based trade group, said that when the industry signed onto the 2001 agreement, “the real magnitude of child labor in the cocoa supply chain and how to address the phenomenon were poorly understood.”
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'A moral responsibility'

The most prominent, sustained public attention to the issue arose 18 years ago with reports from news organizations and the U.S. State Department that linked American chocolate to child slavery in West Africa.

“There is a moral responsibility . . . for us not to allow slavery, child slavery, in the 21st century,” Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.) said at the time.

Engel introduced legislation that would have created a federal labeling system to indicate whether child slaves had been used in growing and harvesting cocoa. It allotted $250,000 to the Food and Drug Administration to develop the labels.

The measure passed the House, but the industry was adamant that no government regulation was necessary.

“We don’t need legislation to deal with the problem,” Susan Smith, then a spokeswoman for the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, told a reporter at the time. “We are already acting.”

Engel, along with then-Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), opted to negotiate an agreement with the chocolate companies.

Now known as the Harkin-Engel Protocol, the deal kept federal regulators from policing the chocolate supply.

But the deal committed the chocolate companies to eradicate child labor from their supply chains and to develop and implement “standards of public certification,” which would indicate that cocoa products had been produced “without any of the worst forms of child labor.”

The top officials of Hershey, Mars, Nestlé USA and five other chocolate companies signed onto the deal. The signing companies had “primary responsibility” for eradicating child labor, lawmakers said, but the Ivorian government, labor organizations and a consumer group also pledged support.

The protocol also specified a deadline: July 2005.

So what could chocolate reparations look like?

Over the last year, the Washington D.C.-based nonprofit Mighty Earth discovered evidence of large-scale deforestation in the cocoa-growing regions of Ivory Coast, Ghana, Indonesia, Ecuador, Cameroon, and Peru. The environmental organization states in its West African report, Chocolate’s Dark Secret, that a significant portion of Ivory Coast’s national parks and protected areas has been cleared of forest cover and replaced with cocoa-growing operations. Satellite mapping and other data gathered between 1990 and 2015 show that Ivory Coast has lost 85 percent of its forests, and Ghana is on a similar trajectory. “Without action,” the report reads, “Ghana stands to lose all remaining forests outside its national parks in the next decade. Chimpanzees, elephants, and other wildlife populations have been decimated by the conversion of forests in both countries to cocoa; in Ivory Coast, only 200-400 elephants remain from an original population of hundreds of thousands.”

Chocolate companies, cocoa processors and governments have come together under the Cocoa and Forests Initiative. 

Between 1990 and 2015, the Ivory Coast lost 85 percent of its forests