26 Feb to 11 March 2007

Promoting Fairtrade should a fact of life

While chocolate is sweet for us, it can be heartbreaking for the hundreds of thousands of child labourers that pick the cocoa that goes into some of our favourite treats. In 2001, the U.S. State Department, the International Labour Organization and others reported child slavery on many cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast, source of 43% of the world’s cocoa. Subsequent research by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture revealed some 284,000 children between the ages of 9 and 12 working in hazardous conditions on West African cocoa farms. Of these children, it was reported that some 12,000 child cocoa workers that had participated in the study were likely to have arrived in their situation as a result of child trafficking.

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