Brand scandals

Chocolate is a product that most of the people cannot live without, because of its sweetness,

delicious taste and the pleasure they experience while eating. One fact many are unaware of

regarding the real price of what they eat is the number of children daily working in cocoa

farms in Western Africa and South America. The plantations supply companies such as

Hershey, Nestle, Mars, Kraft/Mondelez and others with cocoa. The main problem that is

neglected is the child labor and slavery, which consists of harsh conditions for living and

working, far from the family, as well as very low wages for the enormous amount of work.

This creates big image problems, brand scandals and crises for the producers. From the legal

point it leads to some law suits and financial fines for the multinational producers and often

no further actions for improvement of the situation till the next scandal. As the problem

becomes more public, conscientious people and organizations act to eliminate it. The issue

has two sides – one is the brand scandals which influences negatively the producer, however

even more important for the society is the social side of it – the actual child slavery, which

should be fought against.

The number of children, who are victims of cocoa child labor in West Africa is around two

million and the most popular destinations for this kind of slavery are Ivory Coast and Ghana

(Clarke, 2015). According to a report of the Tulane University (2011) 10% of Ghana’s

children and 40% of those in Ivory Coast are forced to work and do not have the opportunity

to study. Initially this is a result of the poverty of both the inhabitants and cocoa farmers. The

first do not have the resources to buy the necessary attributes in order to send their young ones

to school if there are such educational institutions whereas farmers do not gain enough to pay

grown up workers, because of the cheap price of cocoa. (Fair Trade USA, 2017) These two

sides meet each other in the way that the planters resort to child labor, since they are low paid.

On the other hand the children work in order to support financially their parents. Another

aspect of the downsides of for the cocoa slaves is the working conditions. These youngsters

aged 5-17 are given to use sharp tools like machetes and heavy chemicals (Clarke, 2015). In

fact nobody there, really thinks how dangerous it may be for adults, not to mention children

and what kinds of irreversible consequences for each ones health it may have.