Children in West Africa still forced into labor and trafficked to make chocolate, report says

WAfrica children still exploited to make chocolate

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — A report says West Africa’s cocoa industry is still trafficking children and using forced child labor despite nearly a decade of efforts to eliminate the practices.

A U.S.-sponsored solution called the Harkin-Engel Protocol was signed in 2001 by cocoa industry members to identify and eliminate cocoa grown using forced child labor in West Africa by 2010.

Independent auditors at Tulane University’s Payson Center for International Development said in a late September report that efforts have not come close to the target.

The report says that hundreds of thousands of children are still involved in work on cocoa farms, and are trafficked to Ivory Coast and Ghana, the world’s two largest cocoa growers.