Is It Fair To Eat Chocolate? By Deborah Dunn

Have you ever wondered how chocolate is actually made? A lot of people do. But most people don’t know that child labor is a big part of chocolate making. Chocolate and slavery is talked a lot about in the chocolate article “Is It Fair to Eat Chocolate?” by Deborah Dunn. The article explains how child labor intertwines with chocolate making, how chocolate is made, and how to prevent child labor while making chocolate. Chocolate has a dark history.

Chocolate has a dark history. So how does chocolate promote slavery? “Imagine this: 12-year old Sametta in Cote D'ivoire, West Africa. She wakes up at 4:00 a.m, eats millet porridge, then walks two miles to her family’s cocoa bean field. For the next 12 hours she picks cocoa pods and breaks them open so she can scoop out the 30-50 seeds, or “beans,” inside. About 400 beans are needed to make one pound of chocolate. Sametta does not go to school. Her family needs her to work in order for them to survive.” (“Is It Fair to Eat Chocolate?” Paragraph 2 by Deborah Dunn). Children just like Sametta have to work over 10 hours everyday. They do not get access to school so they cannot learn. Instead, they have to work hard for money. Most children

Why does this happen? A lot of people would ask that. A lot of people could also be asked why these people don’t get paid enough. “This is not a story from 200 years ago. It’s happening right now! Everyday in the Ivory Coast, as well as in Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon, about 300,000 children are forced to pick cocoa beans that will be sold to big chocolate companies like Nestle and Cargill. About 6,000 of these children are treated like slaves.” (“Is It Fair to Eat Chocolate?” Paragraph 3 by Deborah Dunn). The big chocolate industries who buy from cocoa farms that have child labor often don’t pay close to a fair amount of money. Since this happens, the cocoa farmers do not get paid much in return. That is why most families who work in cocoa farms are