Chocolate’s Heart of Darkness: Child Labour in Ivory Coast
The dark side of a $100bn industry where enslaved children work in cocoa fields for the chocolate we all love to eat.
Editor’s note: This film is no longer available to view online.
We often indulge ourselves and our loved ones with chocolate, but we rarely stop to think about how it gets from the cocoa tree to the sweet shop.
This film, Chocolate’s Heart of Darkness, goes to Ivory Coast, which produces about 40 percent of the world’s cocoa. It tells the story of how thousands of children from neighbouring Burkina Faso and Ghana are trafficked to harvest cocoa pods.
The children work long days with poisonous pesticides and dangerous tools, with little or no reward. The Ivory Coast farms and cooperatives then supply the cocoa to the biggest chocolate producers in the world.
In this investigation into child labour and deforestation, we travel to Europe to ask the chocolate industry executives and members of the European Parliament why an industry worth more than $100bn every year is still involved in virtual slavery and environmental destruction.