Halloween and Valentine’s Day may have candy retailers salivating over crowds of sweet-toothed trick-or-treaters and lovebirds purchasing boxes of chocolate truffles — but nothing quite compares to Easter, the candy Holy Grail. According to CNBC, “in the week before Easter last year, Americans spent $823 million on creme-filled eggs, chocolate rabbits, and colored marshmallow Peeps.” In terms of weight, Americans bought 146 million pounds of candy, or comparatively speaking, the “weight of more than 11,000 African bush elephants.”
Needless to say, it’s the candy industry’s most profitable week of the year — and chocolate sales play a huge role in that. According to TheChocolateStore.com, “Americans consume 2.8 billion pounds of chocolate each year, or over 11 pounds per person.” That’s correct. Every year, we consume the equivalent of a large bowling ball in chocolate, from Reese’s and Snickers to chocolate bunnies and fondue. It’s no secret that Americans are crazy about chocolate.
But have you ever wondered where most of your favorite treats are coming from. Though the chocolate company controversy has been widely publicized over the years, many people are still unaware that by purchasing from most of the major brands, they are funding child slaves in West Africa. The region that houses nearly two-thirds of all cacao beans on the planet exploits young children to work 80 to 100 hour weeks with no pay.
According to the Huffington Post, the following staggering statistics about the slave trade: According to a BBC investigation, hundreds of thousands of children are being purchased from their parents or outright stolen and shipped to Ivory Coast to work as slaves on cocoa farms. Destitute parents in these impoverished areas sell their children to traffickers, hoping that they will find honest work in Ivory Coast and send some of their earnings back home.
The terrible reality is that these children, aged 11 to 16, but sometimes younger, are forced to work 80 to 100 hours per week doing hard manual labor. They are not paid, receive no education, are malnourished, and are frequently viciously beaten if they attempt to flee. The majority of them will never see their families again. So which chocolate bigwigs are the culprits? According to an article shared over 1 million times by US Uncut, the following companies are well-known for using this brutal child slave labor.