What's Scarier than Halloween? Blood Chocolate

"Candy's Dark Side" is a Change.org series that looks at the health, ethical, and environmental costs of producing Halloween treats. Check back every day this week for more installments of this series.

During this week's ghoulish Halloween festivities, Americans will binge on a predicted $2.2 billion worth of candy — much of it chocolate. But despite the sweets' popularity, few consumers realize the truly scary labor conditions behind most of their peanut-butter cups and snack-sized chocolate bars.

Top cocoa-producing countries like Ghana and Cote D'Ivoire remain rife with forced child labor, child trafficking, extremely low pay, and near slave-like conditions, according to an annual audit released last month by Tulane University's Payson Center for International Development. These conditions have persisted despite Western and African government efforts to eliminate "blood chocolate," the report concludes, largely due to the lack of funding from private sector companies within the $10 billion chocolate industry. To keep the cost of our treats low, about 3.6 million children in West Africa work on cocoa farms, according to the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), many of whom were trafficked illegally from other countries. There are about 150,000 child slaves just in Cote d’Ivoire. American kids may look forward to trick-or-treating, but many of those goodies were produced by children younger than them.

Hershey's, according to another new study by leading human rights and labor rights non-profits, is one company in particular that perpetuates child labor by failing to monitor how its cocoa is produced. Top European candy companies like Cadbury and Nestle recently introduced Fair Trade-certified cocoa into some of their products, an auditing system that aims to eliminate child labor throughout the entire supply chain. Hershey's, the largest North American chocolate manufacturer, refuses to adopt third-party certification for its cocoa and hasn't introduced any Fair Trade products. Why? The company is more concerned with profits than sweetening up its labor practices. Fair Trade certification requires that chocolate makers pay more for each ton of cocoa, allowing cocoa farmers to earn more money and enjoy better working conditions.

Leading American companies like Hershey's buy tons upon tons of cocoa, and they pressure producers to keep beans cheap, regardless of the high environmental and social costs. Corporations like Hershey's "have been able to control initiatives meant to eliminate forced, child and trafficked labor in West Africa’s cocoa industry" through their purchasing power, according to a January report by the International Labor Rights Forum.

American companies may publicly announce their commitment to improving cocoa-producing conditions, but without legal requirements to do so, many fall short in actually achieving this goal. Last month, the U.S. Department of Labor, along with Sen. Tom Harkin, Rep. Eliot Engel, and Ghanain and Ivory Coast leaders signed a declaration to renew efforts to uphold the Harkin-Engel Protocol, which was created in 2001 to identify and eliminate cocoa grown using forced child labor in West Africa by 2010. The protocol has largely failed, according to the Tulane report, because companies were not bound to comply. They were merely encouraged to voluntarily create and adopt their own certification systems for cocoa.

With Halloween upon us, now is as good a time as any for Hershey's and other candy companies to adopt Fair Trade cocoa. Last week, international cocoa regulators announced an increase in the amount given to Fair Trade cocoa farmers, from $150 to $200 per ton. The boost may help small cocoa farmers earn more money from less product so they won't need to rely on forced child labor, according to the Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO), the official regulatory body of the Fair Trade industry. An estimated 1.2 million farmers and workers currently sell through the Fair Trade scheme, and FLO believes the hike in premium will encourage more producers to join the initiative.

The demand for chocolate continues to grow, so we've got to make sure that child labor in Africa doesn't explode along with it. Sign our petition asking Hershey's to end the blood chocolate trade by incorporating Fair Trade-certified cocoa into its products.

Photo credit: ginnerobot via Flickr