Reverse Trick-or-Treaters Call Attention to Child Labor in Cocoa Fields
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Don’t be surprised if the “trick-or-treaters” at your front door this Halloween give you something in return for the candy or fruit you hand them. This year on Oct. 31, children, students and adults across the country will hand out fair trade chocolates attached to an informational card about child labor abuses in the cocoa industry.
The human rights group Global Exchange, in cooperation with Equal Exchange , a fair trade coop, is sponsoring “Reverse Trick-or-Treating” to call attention to the abuse of some 3.6 million children in the cocoa fields of West Africa.
For more information or to get involved in Reverse Trick-or-Treating, click here.
Help Stop Child Labor in the Cocoa Fields
With the Easter holiday approaching, many U.S. children and their parents will celebrate with chocolate bunnies and other chocolate-covered treats. But for children in West Africa, Easter will simply be another desolate day of harvesting cocoa, the main ingredient in chocolate, under inexcusable conditions.
AFT has launched a campaign to stop the importation of child-harvested cocoa beans or chocolate made from them. You can take action. Click here to send a message to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack urging him to ensure chocolate products Americans eat are not spoiled by the bitterness of child labor.
More than half of the world’s supply of cocoa is harvested in the two West African nations of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast). Growing and harvesting the crop depends upon the labor of 3.6 million children caught in the worst forms of child labor, according to the International Cocoa Verification Board (ICVB). Children must climb trees with machetes to cut down cocoa pods. They handle and apply dangerous pesticides, burn brush and carry back-breaking loads, ICVB says. ICVB is non-profit, multi-stakeholder organization that monitors child and forced labor in cocoa production.
