Child Labor- Chocolate By- Tyree Henderson Desmond McDonald Devaughn McDonald

A major pandemic in our society is Child Labor. By educating the people on what the task at hand is, we can solve Child Labor by honing in on what we are supporting in our world.

In West Africa, cocoa is a commodity crop grown primarily for export. As the chocolate industry has grown over the years, so has the demand for cheap cocoa. Today, cocoa farmers barely make a living selling the beans and often resort to the use of child labor in order to keep their prices competitive. The children of West Africa are surrounded by intense poverty and most begin working at a young age to help support their family. Some children end up on the cocoa farms because they need work and they are told the pay is good. Other children are “sold” by their own relatives to traffickers or to the farm owners, and it has also been documented that traffickers often abduct the young boys from small villages in neighboring African countries Problem

Two African nations, Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, produces more than half of the world's cocoa.

Provide education for the children, changing the work conditions. Solution

No one can really determine if the chocolate they bought has used child labor Children get beaten if they don’t hurry, dragging the pods into large sacks Accidents happen while handling the machete to cut open the pods Children are mostly 12-16, but some children who are 7 have been seen working on the farms. Children who are 7 have worked up until their adulthood or teenage years. An investigation was held into Nestle and it shows that Nestlé’s cocoa supply chain has many child labor violations. This specific problem is located in Ivory Coast, and 72 percent of injuries were from the workers using machetes. Chocolate labor- Facts