This chocolate flavored post is devoted to a decades-long crisis in West Africa: cocoa farming in Ghana and Ivory Coast. Few industries have so little regard for ethics and human rights. My fixation with the truth behind chocolate blossomed after I watched the Bitter Chocolate episode from Netflix’s Rotten docuseries.

I can no longer hear or see “Black Lives Matter” without immediately thinking about West African cocoa farming.

The BLM trigger makes me wince at how little the workers matter in comparison to our self-serving passions for brownies and cake.

Black lives mattering goes so much deeper than most people will ever begin to realize.

“Aly Diabate was almost 12 when a slave trader promised him a bicycle and $150 a year to help support his poor parents in Mali. He worked for a year and a half for a cocoa farmer who is known as Le Gros (‘The Big Man’), but he said his only rewards were the rare days when Le Gros’ overseers or older slaves didn’t flog him with a bicycle chain or branches from a cacao tree.

…Aly said he doesn’t know what the beans from the cacao tree taste like after they’ve been processed and blended with sugar, milk and other ingredients. That happens far away from the farm where he worked, in places such as Hershey, PA, Milwaukee, and San Francisco.

‘I don’t know what chocolate is,’ said Aly.“

—How Your Chocolate May Be Tainted, Knight Ridder Newspapers¹

I recently watched Adu, a moving film illustrating the plight of refugee children as they leave their homes in different parts of Africa.

In the film, there was a quote from a Spanish coast guard:

“¿Sabes que es el problema de Africa?” Do you know what Africa’s problem is?

“Que todos se van.” That they all leave.

The coast guard’s lines were meant to show his ignorance and how easily he removes himself from taking responsibility.

I alter the quote and find more accuracy:

“¿Sabes que es el problema de Africa?” 

Todos los que van.

Everyone who goes.

Ghanan And Ivorian Lives Matter

 “When people eat chocolate, they are eating my flesh.”

—Drissa, former slave who never tasted chocolate²

My knowledge of the African continent was not gained from school but from solo journeys at age 19 to Kenya’s highest prevalence area of malaria and HIV, from summiting Kilimanjaro on a standard tour (naive to the fact that porters would carry up watermelons for my group), and from one month of hitchhikes and homemade Friday couscous lunches through Morocco.

Educating myself on the diversity of the African continent also derives from a childlike curiosity. Towards the beginning of my world trip I pored over Blood River, a favorite book detailing the failed state of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

I did a recent check up on this ravaged country only to find that public mass rapes by military members, including by child soldiers, are considered a weapon of war. I searched the DCR only to learn that rape is a legal form of “national security,” and that women and children continue to be sex trafficked to other parts of Africa and to Western Europe, especially to Belgium (hello hello, the country’s formal colonizer who is still fucking around with it).

I digress. Excuse me for needing to blow off some steam.

Last winter I spent weeks researching and piecing together a blog post on how the global chocolate industry exploits the West African people and environment. I also explained how and why I stopped consuming commercial chocolate.

Just as my draft came together, a mistaken tap of my mousepad poofed the whole thing.

Here is the best effort at a recreation. Important links and references have been included for further education.

First, some

Facts & Figures

 

• The global chocolate industry makes over $100 billion in sales each year³
  

• Two-thirds of the world’s chocolate is supplied by West Africa, namely Ghana and Ivory Coast³
  

• 2 million West African children do dangerous chocolate farming work.^{4, 7}
  • Children regularly handle machetes; most have scars on their body from machete injuries.²
  • Children sport open wounds and hernias from carrying heavy loads.⁴
  • Some children work 100 hours per week.⁵
  • These children are as young as five years old^2,3, some estimate 40% are girls², and many are unpaid and receive regular beatings.^2,5

• Children are abducted² or tricked into slavery by traffickers, who falsely promise food, education, and earnings.
  • Trafficked children often come from neighboring West African countries including Mali and Burkina Faso.⁴
  • Not so coincidentally, West Africa was a key player and supplier of slaves during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Don’t know if anyone else noticed.

• Ivory coast has lost more than 80% of it’s rainforests since 1960.⁵
  • 13 of 23 Ivorian protected areas have lost all primate populations^5,6  and five protected areas have lost half of their primate species.⁶
  • 200-400 elephants remain from the hundreds of thousands that originally populated Ivory Coast.⁷
  • Not so coincidentally, 1960 is known as the Year of Africa. This year is often considered to be the end of the Scramble for Africa, or imperialistic partitioning of the continent by European powers.
    

• Cocoa production is Ghana’s leading cause of deforestation⁸
  • Global Forest Watch estimated a 60% increase of primary rainforest loss in Ghana from 2017-2018⁸
    

• The World Bank sets the global extreme poverty line at earning less than $1.90 per day.

• Chocolate farmers in Ghana earn on average 82 cents a day, and in Ivory Coast 54 cents a day.⁷
  

“I admit that it is a kind of slavery…they bring them here to work, and it’s the boss who takes the money.”

—Ivory Coast farmer, Cocoa’s Child Laborers³

 

• In Ivory Coast, pisteurs load and transport heavy sacks of cocoa beans from the farm to pirvately owned “co-op” hubs.⁹
  • Pisteurs are the only contact that Ivorian farmers have with the chocolate industry.⁹
  • Poor road conditions means it can easily take six hours for a pisteur to drive 60 km (37 mi).⁹
  • There are frequent cases of armed robberies and murders of pisteurs.⁹
    
    

• Ghana and Ivory coast sell their chocolate to cocoa traders who essentially serve as middlemen.
  • Cocoa traders may also be called ‘cocoa processors’ or ‘cocoa suppliers.’
  • About a dozen suppliers dominate global cocoa trade⁹ with half the market being controlled by the three most notorious companies: Cargill (USA), Olam International (multinational; Singapore HQ), and Barry Callebaut (Belgian-French; Switzerland HQ).⁷
  • Cargill has a net worth of nearly $40 billion, and earned $113.5 billion in revenue in 2019.¹⁰

• The chocolate traders then sell processed cocoa to the familiar retail brands we love, including
  • KitKat, Milo, (Nestle)
  • Snickers, Twix, M&Ms (Mars)
  • Nutella (Ferrero)
  • Oreos, Milka (Kraft)
  • Hershey’s Kisses, Reese’s (Hershey)
  • Cadbury (Mondelez)
  • Lindt, Ghirardelli (Lindt)
  • Godiva, Ülker (Yildiz)
  • Ben and Jerry’s, Magnum, Cornetto, Klondike, Breyers (Unilever)
  • Starbucks
  • Amul
  • Meiji
    

• None of these companies can trace their imported cocoa to the farms of origin, or state that their chocolate is free of forced child labor.
  • Mars can trace 24% of its cocoa back to farms.³
  • Hershey and Nestle can trace less than half of their cocoa back to farms.³
    

• 60% of Ivory Coast lacks access to electricity.³
  

• Ivory Coast has a 44% literacy rate.³
  

• Fair trade is not fair.

• UTZ and Rainforest Alliance are not reliable labels.²

   

• The corruption and greed of the Ghanan and Ivorian governments and child traffickers also play a major role in human rights violations and environmental deterioration.
  

• The global chocolate demand is rising.¹¹
  • The Netherlands imports the most cocoa beans at $2.1 billion.⁴
  • The US imports the most cocoa powder at $220 million.⁴
  • US consumers spend $13 billion on chocolate every year.¹
  • Switzerland, Austria, Germany, the UK, Sweden, Belgium, Russia, the US, and France have the world’s highest per capita chocolate consumption, in that order.
    

• Comprehensive lists of recommendable chocolate brands exist, such as the Food Empowerment Project Chocolate List

A Personal Testimony

I can’t walk very far in the world before coming face-to-face with Snickers. This is just one example of a brand who thrives on West African cocoa to keep costs low. In any given corner of the world, the village shop will have a Snickers, Cadbury, or Nestle display box right on the front counter.

From Fuji to Kilimanjaro to WuTai, the mountains are full of hikers knocking back Snickers.

High-elevation hiking has become synonymous with packing Snickers. My friends who are trekking guides in Nepal announced that after all their trials and errors, from now on their only caloric intake on the trails will be Snickers. Before and after a day’s walking they’ll have meals at Nepali guesthouses, but in their backpacks there will be no more stoves, instant noodles, or nuts.

Just Snickers.

I can’t blame them. A mostly frozen Snickers is fucking good.

The difference is that now I care. I cannot stroll past a brownie or the flashy array of chocolate candy bars without seeing children who never had a shot at a future. I see generations of Ghanans and Ivorians tied to farming cacao while foreign corporations sweep away all their harvest.

I hear bellies squelching from hunger.

I see nauseating racial and skin color implications. I see post-colonial colonialism.

3-ingredient recipes and healthy Snickers substitutes included at the bottom of the post.

The international community’s unconditional love for Snickers is interesting to my American eyes. Similar to McDonald’s, Snickers is so commonplace in the United States, so buried under more appealing brands and products, that it is largely ignored.

Snickers sits untouched on reception desks and hides in the back of drawers.

The Halloweens of my American childhood reaped in so much candy that every year I eagerly separated the undesirable pieces into their own reject pile. This would be given away or placed in our own candy bowl for trick-or-treaters still coming to our door, recycling it back into the Halloween candy economy. Snickers always got sorted out first.

Without traveling to Asia and South America, I’d never notice the stronghold that Snickers truly has. New varieties are constantly rolling out. Cashew snickers for 10 rupees (13 cents) in India. Sunflower seed or hazelnut Snickers in Armenia.

On the Torres del Paine trekking circuit in Chilean Patagonia, almond Snickers was one of the few items invariably included in the sparse inventory of the small campsite shops.

For all the murders and machete wounds and spinal cord injuries, West African cocoa farmers don’t eat chocolate. We do.

We don’t eat chocolate because we need to. We eat it because we think we love to.

I blew nearly a decade of my life on a constant chocolate hunt, driven by the idea of some daily quota that I should satisfy. I often caught myself making a purchase because “I haven’t had chocolate today,” or picking something without cocoa because “I already had chocolate today.”

My indecisive brain literally used chocolate to convince myself that I had made the best choice.

In foreign countries I stepped into small shops for essential items, but as I paid the cashier, you can bet that I was scanning those snack shelves. My eyes darted nervously between new chocolate wafers and candy bars that I hand’t tried. I would mentally note the products that caught my eye so that I could return for them.

Another habit was hunting down aesthetic cafes to order cute cakes and hot chocolate, which would be snarfed down and forgotten forever.

These cravings were a fabrication of my mind. Social conditioning and marketing told me that I liked chocolate. But I only liked the idea of chocolate.

I ask myself if I care about the trafficked children and vanishing wildlife. Setting aside the notion of skin color, I ask myself if Ghanan and Ivorian lives matter.

Letting go has never been so easy.

However, I do have a disclaimer. It took me a lifetime of eating chocolate to get here.

It took Halloweens of bite-sized Mr. Goodbars and Krackels.

It took kilos of Nutella, including an entire jar used for a single tray of brownies baked in a beachside condo.

It took influencing the entire carpool of a camping trip to swerve for a Frosty or McFlurry pit stop.

It took Rome’s tartufo (“death by chocolate”).

It took Vienna’s Sachertorte.

Twice.

It took breakfasts of crushing Oreos over yogurt before biking 50 kilometers through North Argentine landscape.

It took homemade slutty brownies.

It took steep stacks of Trader Joes Organic 72% Cacao Belgian Dark and Trader Joes Swiss Dark Chocolate with 30% Whole Hazelnuts shoved in refrigerator crevices.

It took Christmas stockings sagging with Ferrero Rochers from Santa Claus.

It took Clif bars towed on world class hiking trails and through Wonders of the World.

It took Cocoa Puffs and Cookie Crisps and Hershey’s Kisses and Samoas and Thin Mints and Tootsie Rolls and Tootsie Pops and cute owls on TV asking how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop????

I distinctly remember not liking chocolate as a young girl and voicing it. Anyone who heard me would become mortified.

Yet my upbringing was set in the epicenter of research and funding on how to ensure that we stay addicted to cheap chocolate. Needless to say, I eventually fell into the darkness and have glutted my way through a numberless quantity of wrappers and cake pans and ice cream tubs, and encouraged others to do so as well.

Mindless consumption in the way I have described above was no doubt a privilege. Perhaps I needed all that harm, to myself and to West Africa, of sampling and indulging and overindulging in order to be able to drop it cold.

I am not asking for anyone to change. But to those who ask it of themselves:

Change takes time. Be kind to yourself. Education and awareness is the start.

Phasing out of Nestle products took me a year (Nestle crimes are a whole debacle that deserve a book of their own).

No matter the industry we look into, abuse and suffering will greet us. We can honor those without a voice through our daily choices.

Ivorians, Ghanans, and trafficked Burkina Fasans and Malians are not living their lives.

They are enslaved to their lives.

Empty Promises

Chocolate bars made of West African cocoa come in packages that are scrapbooked with sustainability and Fair Trade logos. The richest chocolate companies put out statements and set goals on ending child slavery. Their words are 100% fluff.

If you need to make statements or open investigations, something is already drastically wrong.

These same corporations are currently being sued by former child slaves.

If the smallest drop of intention was there, a straightforward action would be taken. A decision such as, oh I don’t know, maybe to pull out of the West African market. This would force the Ghanan and Ivorian governments to change something in a significant way.

But the reality remains—$100 billion a year is not enough to pay cocoa farmers a living wage.

Some brands even have the audacity to print “Ivory Coast Beans” or “Ghanan Cocoa” in huge block letters on the front of their product.

Many more “eco-friendly” companies use West African cocoa while claiming that they source from farms which are sustainable and free of child labor. Great.

Yet West African child labor in the chocolate industry has in fact increased from 2015 to 2018.¹²

I have been to places inside and outside of Africa riddled with corruption and child labor, where NGOs are actually just a billboard sign with nothing behind it because the “founders” have taken off with all the funding. Where “foster families” are using orphans as servants. Where foreign aid has distorted the local perception of the outside world. Where the police and priests are rampant sexual predators.

I can only imagine how different the farm management appears when an inspector comes compared to how it operates on a normal day.

With so many families in a desperate state poverty, child labor is a gray area that is easily slipped into without much notice.

Free of child labor sounds rosy. But who’s checking?

Not me.

Not you.

Aly Diabate and 18 other boys labored…their days began when the sun rose, which at this time of year in Ivory Coast is a few minutes after 6 a.m. They finished work about 6:30 in the evening, just before nightfall…they trudged home to a dinner of burned bananas. If they were lucky, they were treated to yams seasoned with saltwater ‘gravy.’

After dinner, the boys were ordered into a 24-by-20- foot room, where they slept on wooden planks without mattresses. The only window was covered with hardened mud except for a baseball-size hole to let some air in.

‘Once we entered the room, nobody was allowed to go out,’ said Mamadou Traore, a thin, frail youth with serious brown eyes who is 19 now. ‘Le Gros gave us cans to urinate. He locked the door and kept the key.’

…’I bought each of you for 25,000 francs (about $35),’ the farmer said, according to Mamadou (MAH-mahdoo). ‘So you have to work harder to reimburse me.’

Aly was barely 4 feet tall when he was sold into slavery, and he had a hard time carrying the heavy bags of cocoa beans. ‘Some of the bags were taller than me,’ he said. ‘It took two people to put the bag on my head. And when you didn’t hurry, you were beaten.’

He was beaten more than the other boys were. You can still see the faint scars on his back, right shoulder and left arm.

…’The beatings were a part of my life,’ Aly said. ‘Anytime they loaded you with bags and you fell while carrying them, nobody helped you. Instead, they beat you and beat you until you picked it up again.’

—How Your Chocolate May Be Tainted, Knight Ridder Newspapers¹

Did you ever notice?

Did you ever notice that chocolate is vegan? The human nutrition and climate change conversations bring an increasing shift towards advocating plant-based nutrition. We realize chocolate is vegan, clap our hands, and do a little dance. Proudly slap on that V symbol. Because chocolate without milk is absolutely and positively vegan.

But what is there to celebrate about a bar if the farmers who brought it to life were trafficked from ages as young as five?

What is there to be proud of in a product that caused deforestation and habitat loss, drove primates to extinction, and racked up carbon emissions from shipments across highways and oceans?

That is packaged in plastic and printed with ink that must come from a factory where toxic chemicals invariably harm workers and contaminate natural water supplies?

Did you ever notice that for a highway to exist, it had to slice its way through the most vulnerable local communities and fuck up the homes of countless wildlife? For our fun vegan beers and chocolates and coffees to reach our hands, bird nests had to fall to the ground and turtles had to get crushed trying to cross the road in their futile dreams to reach the ocean. Insects and amphibians perished without protest.

Did you ever notice that the developing world suffers from a shortage of Covid-19 vaccines, but there was not for a moment a shortage of Snickers?

From my standpoint from various Indian villages, the ongoing pandemic resulted in all sorts of scarcities, but never of Kinder Eggs, Amul chocolate bars, Hershey’s cocoa powder, or Nutella.

I wonder how the Covid-19 outbreaks were felt by the families and trafficked minors tied to incessant global demands for chocolate. I wonder if you polled Americans, about 1:3 in being against to being in favor of Covid-19 vaccination, how different the ratio would be if the question was, would you stop eating chocolate because it is bad for you and for others?

I wonder what the results would be if the public was shown all the cocoa crimes, and everyone was polled on if they would quit chocolate.

I wonder what the results would be if the question was changed to “would you stop eating chocolate if it meant you could eat anything else and look exactly how you wanted for the rest of your life?”

“Nobody needs chocolate…it’s absolute madness that for a gift that no one really needs, so many people suffer.”

—Paul Schoenmakers, Tony’s Chocolonely*

*Tony’s Chocolonely falls under the Cannot Recommend category of the FEP Chocolate List due to unfair farmer pay.

Low prices, but at the cost of who?

Being quarantined in India means I now exclusively consume Indian cocoa. By no means does that insinuate that the chocolate I purchase or make on my own has miraculously become cruelty-and-guilt-free. Capitalism’s labor system is riddled with injustice.

Buying domestic just means that I’m not participating in the vile, inhumane scheme where somehow people of darker shades of brown earn next to nothing while people of lighter shades of brown become filthy rich.

Buying more ethically just means that I’m not contributing the pain, unfair monopolization, post-colonialism colonialism, and post-slavery slavery that has been cleverly swept under the rug of our conscience.

I’d even comply with buying chocolate from Costa Rica or Ecuador. Just not from West Africa.

This means the chocolate I consume underwent a significant price hike. A bar might easily cost $4 instead of $1.

But I also buy chocolate far less often and with my conscience ringing through my ears. Portion size has been reduced. My net expenditures on chocolate have not gone up. If anything, the shift has helped me save money.

Chocolate originated among Mesoamerican cultures who regarded it as sacred. Cacao was used as a luxury drink for the elite, an essential component of rituals and ceremonies, a form of currency, and was believed to be a divine gift from the God of Wisdom.

Perhaps cacao should be less of a low-quality, mindless daily munchie and more of a seldom splurge of self-love.

Takeaways

Child trafficking, forced labor, unpaid workers, and beatings are wrong.

Deforestation, habitat destruction, and driving species to extinction are wrong.

Individually wrapped packaging is wrong.

The ability to earn a living wage is a human right.

When we hurt others, we hurt ourselves.

Many cocoa production workers have never seen or tasted a final chocolate product.

The chocolate consumer cannot know that their chocolate did not involve child labor.

Humans do not need chocolate.

The familiar chocolate retailers use West African cocoa.

Many non-West African countries around the world produce their own chocolate.

Eating higher quality chocolate less often does not raise your budget.

We can change our perception of chocolate to be seen as an indulgent treat, rather than a daily source of cheap pleasure.

Most labels, including Fair Trade, UTZ, and Rainforest Alliance, are meaningless.

This post does not insinuate that the conditions of non-West African chocolate farmers are ideal, or even pleasant. It just means we have the option to not contribute to a post-colonialist scheme that earns $100 billion a year, but does nothing to effectively end outright slavery.

This doesn’t mean that there are not other horrifying industries out there and that they don’t matter too. Example: female child labor in India’s agarbatti (stick incense) industry.

Making your own chocolate and baked goods is easy and fun (recipes below).

If one truly, truly cares, there is nothing difficult about making the switch.

 

How To Proceed

Awareness is the first step. Don’t jump to extreme lifestyle changes before you are ready, and never underestimate how long it takes ready oneself.

Be compassionate with yourself. Surrender to the process no matter how many months or years it takes.

For shopping, the single most powerful resource I’ve found is the Food Empowerment Project’s Chocolate List.

The brand of any chocolate-containing product we buy can be looked up in this list with a quick ctrl + F. FEP has been extremely thorough with contacting food companies, big or small, around the world. To my surprise, the list includes Mason&Co, my favorite Indian bean-to-bar chocolate.

When it comes to dining out, ask where the chocolate powder or beans is sourced from or what brand of cocoa powder is used in the kitchen. Chances are, you’ll have to walk away. That’s okay—you’ll be met with a euphoric feeling of happiness from the minute you distance yourself.

I will always be a food traveler before I am an activist or a vegan. My personal exceptions to my belligerent avoidance of West African cocoa are:

1. I am food traveling (I’m always food traveling) and an indigenous dish includes chocolate, in which case I’ll purchase it once (i.e. Bhagsu Cake in Bhagsu Nag, Himachal Pradesh, India).

2. I am served chocolate as a guest.

In the common case that you walk away, buy yourself some South American, South Indian, or your closest source of non-West African cacao, and make your own chocolate.

3-Ingredient Recipes

raw vegan chocolate

• Mix room-temperature, liquid coconut oil and cacao powder 1:1.
• Stir in sweetener of choice to taste. In the US I used maple syrup. In India I use jaggery syrup (not raw) or coconut sugar.
• Pour into freezer-friendly container.
• Sprinkle with toppings; I love pumpkin seeds, sea salt, chia, goji berries, cashews, or shredded coconut.
• Freeze for one hour or until set.
• To serve, “crack” into delicious pieces with by stabbing it with a knife.

Simple instructions for homemade jaggery syrup.

A typical recipe for chocolate bark.

snickers speed dates

• Slice Iranian or medjool dates lengthwise, cutting only halfway deep, and remove pits.
• Stuff with a heaped spoon of natural peanut butter (however you want—crunchy, creamy, homemade) and roasted peanuts (optional).
• Melt dark chocolate pieces with a splash of coconut oil in microwave or using the double broiler method. Alternatively, use previous recipe to make raw chocolate and don’t freeze it.
• Smother melted chocolate over stuffed dates until completely coated.
• Drizzle chocolate dates with extra PB if it’s runny enough, and sprinkle with salt. Refrigerate until set and indulge.

Ultra quick version: stuff pitted dates with nut butter, and mash a square of dark chocolate on top. Or stuff dates with a walnut kernel or a helping of tahini. Enjoy at work or on top of a mountain(:

 

Shops and Products I Recommend

Samaritan Xocolata chocolate in Costa Rica
Mason&Co, Bread and Chocolate, and Gelato Factory based in Auroville, India
Handmade chocolate bars by the Organic Mini Market (across from Shiv Shakti Hostel) in Laxman Jhula, Rishikesh, India
Naviluna*
Soklet*
Amul Twilight Tryst single origin dark chocolate bar made from Karnatakan cocoa
Rittersport

*Indian specialty companies that are favorites out here, which have not been listed by FEP but that I can recommend with confidence.

Further Reading

How Your Chocolate May Be Tainted¹
Cocoa’s Child Labors³
CHILD LABOR AND SLAVERY IN THE CHOCOLATE INDUSTRY²
Chocolate’s Dark Secret⁷

Watch

Rotten: Bitter Chocolate by Netflix

References

1- http://www.rrojasdatabank.info/chocolate.pdf
2- https://foodispower.org/human-labor-slavery/slavery-chocolate/
3- https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/business/hershey-nestle-mars-chocolate-child-labor-west-africa/
4- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_labour_in_cocoa_production
5- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa_production_in_Ivory_Coast
6- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/194008291500800110
7- http://www.mightyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/chocolates_dark_secret_english_web.pdf
8- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa_production_in_Ghana#Impacts_on_Environment
9- Rotten: Bitter Chocolate by Netflix
10- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill_family
11- https://theconversation.com/ghanas-cocoa-production-relies-on-the-environment-which-needs-better-protection-134557
12-https://www.just-food.com/news/nestle-mars-among-chocolate-giants-facing-slavery-lawsuit-in-us/