Innocent Chocolate

Where to get blood-free chocolate? Reports of child slavery and abuse on cacao farms led to an investigation by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in 2001, which found that child labor, some of it slave labor, was widespread on farms in the Ivory Coast, which in company with several other West African countries produces most of the world's chocolate.

Nestle, ADM and Cargill have already been sued, primarily over their failure to comply with the Harkin-Engel Protocol, which specified a phase-out of child labor on farms supplying major U.S. cocoa importers by July 2005. The Harkin-Engel Protocol was a voluntary industry initiative and the consequences for violating it may not be particularly great. Enforcement of pre-existing customs laws, such as Section 307 of the Tariff Act of 1930 (prohibiting importation of products made with forced or indentured labor), would prevent chocolate made with child slave labor from entering the country, but the Customs Service has pleaded a lack of enforcement resources.

Two major U.S. chocolate companies, Hershey's and M&M Mars, use large proportions of Ivory Coast chocolate in their products and claim that the supply is too homogeneous by the time they receive it to exclude cocoa produced through the use of child labor.

According to Global Exchange, Fair Trade certification standards prohibit abusive child labor. The standards only apply, however, to farms where "a significant part of the field or processing
work carried out by the producer organisation itself is done through hired labour." Small family farms of 12 acres or less, on which between two-thirds and 90% of the world's chocolate is grown according to some sources, may be permitted to employ children (their own, perhaps) without pay and receive Fair Trade certification anyway. This probably means that a Fair Trade stamp does not guarantee that the product was made without the use of child slave labor, but it may make child labor an unlikely ingredient.

TransFair USA, the organization that certifies fair-trade cocoa imports, maintains a partial list of U.S. chocolate companies that are supplied by fair-trade producers here. The list includes Dagoba, Endangered Species, Green & Blacks, Lake Champlain, Nutiva, and Sweet Earth.

A guy named Steven Millman has systematically inquired about the use of child labor in products from just about all of the major chocolate manufacturers and has compiled a list of those that seem to be child-labor free, including:
El Rey (uses only Venezuelan chocolate)
Clif Bar (does not use Ivorian chocolate)
Chocolove (does not use chocolate produced via exploited labor)
Cloud Nine (uses organic Mexican Criollo beans)
Recchiuti (uses South American beans, primarily Venezuelan)
Droste (uses Ghanaian cocoa and confirms that its sources are child-labor-free)
Dagoba (uses cocoa from the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Venezuela and Bolivia)
Green&Black's (uses cocoa from the Dominican Republic and Belize)
Newman's Own (uses cocoa from Costa Rica)
Rapunzel (uses cocoa from Bolivia and the Dominican Republic)
Scharffenberger (uses Ghanaian beans that are child-labor-free)
Teuscher (confirms that their bean source is child-labor-free)
Endangered Species (uses only Fair Trade cocoa)
Valrhona (uses only Venezuelan chocolate)

Unfortunately most of these confirmations date from 2001 and conditions may have changed. Scharffenberger, for instance, was recently purchased by Hershey Foods. There is nothing on their website that currently indicates where their chocolate comes from or whether they are still committed to slavery-free chocolate.

I have seen claims in several places that organic chocolate is always child-labor free because there are no organic cocoa farms in the areas where child labor is used. There is a useful table of organic, fair trade and slavery-free chocolate here. It includes, in addition to most of those previously mentioned, Sunspire, Terra Nostra, Mayordomo (Mexican-sourced), Whole Foods private label, Trader Joe's Fair Trade and Trader Joe's Organic chocolates.

For cooking, I will investigate Trader Joe's selection to see whether their Fair Trade and Organic department includes any cocoa powder, baking chocolate or chocolate chips. Droste, Newman's Own, Scharffenberger, and Valrhona are often found in supermarkets around here in various forms. For snacking, Chocolove, Dagoba, Green&Black's, and Rapunzel are pretty easy to find in any stores that are both slightly crunchy and slightly upscale (e.g. Pharmaca, Elephant Pharmacy, Rainbow Grocery, etc.).