![]() ![]() Five years later a Tulane University study found child slavery still rampant in West Africa. But though backed by members of Congress, the agreement was voluntary industry lobbying undermined the legislative majority that would have forced compliance. In 2001 leading chocolate manufacturers signed the Harkin-Engel Protocol, agreeing to eliminate forced labor from cocoa production. ![]() According to various news reports and studies, child slavery is endemic in West Africa’s cocoa plantations, particularly in Cote d’Ivoire, the source of 35 percent of the world’s chocolate. Permit me, first, a summary of what I understand of the situation in the cocoa industry. And so it was that, a decade ago, when I read news reports about “human trafficking” in the global chocolate industry (a pleasant euphemism, as if the poor dears were merely stuck at a long red light), I assumed, with a last thin strand of youthful faith in my fellow human beings and the institutions meant to protect us from the consequences of our faults, that this problem had been “taken care of.”īut of course it hasn’t, because our boundless need to consume-even something as ultimately trivial as chocolate-trumps everything. It was so deeply ingrained in me that we had progressed beyond such primitive miseries that I have trouble getting my head around it, no matter how much evidence I see to the contrary. I know better now, but at some level it remains inconceivable to me that slavery still exists in the world. Reconstruction, Redemption, sharecropping, the bought election of 1876, Jim Crow didn’t fit the narrative of American glory and the Ultimate Triumph of Liberty. Lincoln freed the slaves and, in my northern curriculum, that was that. I learned that lesson well I was an excellent student. Lincoln, I was informed when I was nine years old, freed the slaves. Originally published at Front Porch Republic. ![]()
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