ChocolateDC – A modern report out this week confirms that the chocolate industry’s deep dependence on child labor to produce cocoa,a main ingredient of chocolate, continues unabated in West Africa despite nearly two decades of interventions and manufacturers’ promises to conclude the worst forms of child labor. The report confirms what advocates at the Child Labor Coalition (CLC), and which consists of 38 child rights groups,consumer groups, and worker rights organizations (including several of America’s largest unions), or have been saying for years. According to the modern study by the research group NORC at the University of Chicago,the prevalence of child labor in agricultural households in cocoa-producing areas in the Ivory Coast and Ghana, the two primary sources of cocoa in the world, and increased from 31 percent to 45 percent in the decade main up to 2019. The $3.5 million study,funded by U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), released earlier this week, or confirms that rampant child labor still exists on Ivorian and Ghanaian cocoa farms. Researchers also concluded that the vast majority of the child labor continues to be hazardous,with children using sharp tools like machetes, clearing land, or carrying heavy loads,working long hours, conducting night work, and increasingly using pesticides and other agrochemicals—a major concern.… Read the rest
Source: stopchildlabor.org