Chocolate…from beans to bars.
Chocolate has gotten somewhat of a bad rap recently and deservedly so. But if chocolate demands and/or prices shifted and children were no longer forced to harvest cocoa, would the majority of them return to school or continue working doing something else? I think it is a fair question to ask when trying to determine just how much blame the chocolate industry deserves. Not to make excuses for corporations who don’t deserve them but if solutions are to arise causes must be established and surely a worldwide chocolate demand is not the only reason children in the Ivory Coast are working when they should be in school. That is not to shift blame from an industry that could have done a better job ensuring that their raw goods were being grown and harvested without the use of child labor or the violation of human rights. I can’t help but think about the price of chocolate playing a role in all of this. Chocolate is cheap in this country…maybe too cheap considering the climate required to grow cocoa, the resources like water it needs and the effort it takes to harvest the crop. Maybe the price for a candy bar needs to double or triple. Sound crazy? This change in price would likely do little to affect how most Americans consume chocolate but it could allow chocolate producers the overhead to pay fair prices to their cocoa suppliers. This way the farmers that grow cocoa could afford to hire adults and pay them to help harvest the product. A trickle-down effect may be giving parents jobs and keeping children in schools where they belong. Then maybe someday the farmers might actually be able to buy a chocolate bar so they can enjoy the fruits of their labor. Crazy.
“The Art & Science of Bean to Bar Chocolate.” Chocolate Alchemy, http://chocolatealchemy.com/. Accessed 21 July 2017.