チョコレートを愛するすべての人のために原料がどこにから来るか、疑問に思ったか。 他のチョコレート工場のGhiradelliチョコレート工場そして何百万に入り、いろいろな種類のチョコレートを買えるそれはすばらしくないか。 バレンタインはチョコレートなしでは同じではない。 それで、これは新しいココア ポッドである。 ココアの世界の生産のほぼ70%はアフリカから来る。 象牙海岸（35%）、ガーナ（21%）、カメルーン（6%）およびナイジェリア（6%）。 ネザーランドにカカオ豆の輸入高（US$2.1十億）の最も高い年次金融量がある。
The Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania is one of the wealthiest education centers in the world. Founded in 1909 as an orphanage for “male Caucasian” boys, it was awarded 30 percent of the company’s future earnings by Milton S. Hershey upon his death. Thanks to the success of Kit-Kats, Reese’s, and Whoppers, the school is worth a staggering $7.8 billion.....think about that for a moment.
For white boys only.
Now home to more than 2,000 students, it owns a controlling interest in the $22.3 billion Hershey company, a chocolate maker with roots in child protection and education that, in the worst form of irony, allegedly relies on cocoa harvested by Black child laborers in West Africa.
For all those who love chocolate, have you ever wondered where the raw material comes from? Do you even know what it looks like? Isn't it wonderful to be able to go into Ghiradelli Chocolate factory and millions of other Chocolate factories and buy all kinds of exotic tasty chocolate? Valentines wouldn't be the same without chocolate. Easter, birthdays, and so on. Almost 70% of the world’s production of cocoa comes from Africa. Ivory Coast (35%), Ghana (21%), Cameroon (6%) and Nigeria (6%). The Netherlands has the highest yearly monetary amount of cocoa bean imports (US$2.1 billion).
Guess who makes billions of dollars from the chocolate trade? Not the Africans who produce the raw product. Mondelez, who owns Cadbury, pays no UK corporation tax despite accounts showing that Cadbury UK, its subsidiary, made profits of £96.5m in 2014 and £83.6m in 2013. That is just profits, and that is just one such company. The global chocolate market has grown to $98.3 billion in 2016....and we all know where the cocoa comes from.
In Western Africa, cocoa is a commodity crop grown primarily for export; 60% of the Ivory Coast’s export revenue comes from its cocoa. As the chocolate industry has grown over the years, so has the demand for cheap cocoa. On average, cocoa farmers earn less than $2 per day, an income below the poverty line. As a result, they often resort to the use of child labor to keep their prices competitive.
The children of Western Africa are surrounded by intense poverty, and most begin working at a young age to help support their families. Some children end up on the cocoa farms because they need work and traffickers tell them that the job pays well. Other children are “sold” to traffickers or farm owners by their own relatives, who are unaware of the dangerous work environment and the lack of any provisions for an education. Often, traffickers abduct the young children from small villages in neighboring African countries, such as Burkina Faso and Mali, two of the poorest countries in the world. Once they have been taken to the cocoa farms, the children may not see their families for years, if ever.
Most of the children laboring on cocoa farms are between the ages of 12 and 16, but reporters have found children as young as 5. In addition, 40% of these children are girls, and some stay for a few months, while others end up working on the cocoa farms through adulthood.
The first group to question the financial strategies behind the industry’s wealth was a British organization called True Vision Entertainment. In a shocking 2000 documentary titled Slavery: A Global Investigation, the group reported on the chocolate industry’s alleged connection to cocoa harvested by child slaves. The award-winning film opens on stick-thin adolescent boys in the Ivory Coast slinging hundred-pound bags of cocoa pods on their backs, followed by an interview in which the boys express their confusion over not being paid.
Later the filmmakers meet with 19 children who were said to have just been freed from slavery by the Ivorian authorities. Their guardian describes how they worked from dawn until dusk each day, only to be locked in a shed at night where they were given a tin cup in which to urinate. During the first six months (the “breaking-in period”), they say, they were routinely beaten. “The beatings were a part of my life,” says Aly Diabata, one of the former child laborers. “I had seen others who tried to escape. When they tried, they were severely beaten.”
Asked what he’d say to the billions who eat chocolate worldwide (most of the boys have never tried it), one boy replies: “They enjoy something I suffered to make; I worked hard for them but saw no benefit. They are eating my flesh.”
In the eyes of Miki Mistrati, an award-winning documentary filmmaker who released a movie on the subject in 2014, Shady Chocolate, he stressed the importance of Americans taking at least part of the blame. “Consumers have not been critical enough,” he said. “They have not asked why a chocolate bar only costs $1 when the cocoa comes from Africa. Customers have been too easy to trick with smart ads."
The truth is the cheapness and ready availability of product in the world of capitalism is predicated on the murder, exploitation and eradication of human lives.....as long as the product gets to the point of interest. It is the way of the West. This is just one product. Imagine how many lives worldwide, have been taken from the over thousand products they thirst for year round....gold, silver, crude oil, coltan, diamonds, rubber, copper, uranium, precious minerals that make it possible for their own societies to keep maintaining the dominance necessary to dictate to the rest of the world who lives...and who dies.
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