Essay On Slavery In West Africa

In America as a whole, 13 billion dollars a year is spent on chocolate, but what a lot of people don’t know is that child slaves are the ones behind it. In West Africa, families are surrounded by intense poverty, causing children to work at a young age to help try and support themselves and their loved ones. Children sometimes end up working on cocoa farms because they are told by traffickers that the job pays well. This is not the case, most of them get paid under $2 an hour or not at all which is well below the poverty line. Because families don’t have enough money some children are sold to traffickers, when this happens the families usually don’t know that the children will not get a good education, and the work environment is very dangerous. Traffickers even go to the extent of abducting young children from small villages in African countries like Mali. These children who are abducted are taken to work on the cocoa farms causing them not to see their families for years, or maybe never again. The ages of the children vary but usually is between 12 and 16, but children have been found working in the farms at age 5. These kids suffer from

This argument made by many is wrong. Yes, before you buy the chocolate it goes through many countries who bought it from Africa, but if you boycott it the countries will no longer buy it from Africa. Countries buy the chocolate for cheap and then sell it for more. Boycotting will provide countries like these to stop buying the chocolate and if no countries buy the chocolate West Africa will be forced to stop producing the chocolate. This claim is wrong, boycotting is a step in the right direction and will help get the attention of these big industries to tell them they need to stop. Boycotting will force them to change their ways even if it takes a while to get the point