Easter is less than two weeks away and the supermarket shelves are full of chocolate eggs – with Britain’s best-loved brand, Cadbury’s, leading the pack. Their classic creme egg is a seasonal…
Easter is less than two weeks away and the supermarket shelves are full of chocolate eggs – with Britain’s best-loved brand, Cadbury’s, leading the pack.
Small children wielding 3ft machetes hack through tough weeds, with no protective clothing, or crack pods with long sharp knives – and many sustain serious injuries from the hazardous work. Mondelez, Cadbury’s parent company, say they “strongly refute” allegations that they profit from child labor. The report found that, despite pledges from chocolate companies including Cadbury, the proportion of children between the ages of five and 17 involved in cocoa labor has actually risen in Ghana – from 44 percent to 55 percent – since 2009.
Later he watched the boys hacking their way through dense weeds with lethal machetes, sweat pouring from their bodies in the hot sun. He worked long hours cracking pods open with a sharp steel knife, over one-foot-long, and was paid the equivalent of £35 for several months which was sent directly to his parents.
“I suffer a lot when I’m farming,” she says, but adds that she hasn’t told her uncle she wants to stop because “I am afraid”.“I expected to see them plucking pods or spraying pesticides so what I found the most shocking was how involved they were in this really hazardous work,” he says.“They are so young and these machetes are over half their height, at three feet, and you see both boys and girls are hacking through the undergrowth with them.
One bag contains enough cocoa to make 4,000 bars of Dairy Milk and the average farmer produces eight a year.“The cost of clearing the land, buying pesticides and chemicals for the farm is more than the government pays us for each bag of cocoa. And 10 cedis doesn’t stretch far.” Van de Put refused to speak to Antony for the program but Mondelez – who own Cadbury’s – issued a statement saying: “We are deeply concerned by the incidents documented in Dispatches.”
But campaigner Ayn Riggs, founder of Slave Free Chocolate described the evidence obtained by Dispatches as “horrifying”.
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