You like chocolate? Learn the bitter truth about its production.

Once shrouded in mystery and available to a few during rituals, today chocolate is available to everyone, everywhere, in every store, kiosk and gas station. Bitter, with nuts, fruit, milky, white - everyone has their favorite. The report "The global and Polish chocolate market" shows that we are eating more and more of it - in 2007, on average, a Pole ate 4 kg of chocolate a year, 13 years later - 5.2 kg . Austrians and Germans eat even more - 8.3 kg each, and residents of Switzerland, Sweden and Great Britain - over 7 kg each year. This is a huge market, worth over USD 100 billion ¹ .

More and more consumers read labels carefully, looking for information about the place of origin of the product and the method of production. We increasingly choose products from brands that sell ethical food . Ethical, or what? Produced with respect for the environment, respect for human and animal rights, maintaining balance in distribution and fair pay (read more about fair food in a separate article). If we look closely at the chocolate production process, it turns out that the Olmecs' favorite delicacy is no longer so sweet .

Children are employed in cocoa production.

70% of cocoa beans - from which cocoa is made, which is the main ingredient of chocolate - comes from West Africa: Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon. There are over 2 million children working in these countries , including those as young as six years old . For literally slave labor, yes, they are paid - a maximum of about $2 for a full day of work. It is not only picking cocoa beans from bushes, but also hard, physical and dangerous work - such as lifting loads, using pesticides or activities requiring the use of sharp machetes.

Even though in 2001 many governments, non-governmental organizations, producers and corporations signed the so-called The Harkin-Engel Protocol to eliminate child abuse in cocoa farming still has staggering numbers. Many companies still use cocoa harvested in extremely unethical ways . As it turns out, despite the commitment to reduce and ultimately eliminate child labor in the cultivation and harvesting of cocoa beans, over the last decade the number of children working in this way has increased by 14% ² . Reason? According to "The Washington Post", many brands cannot indicate exactly which farm their priceless raw material comes from. Therefore, they cannot determine whether children were involved in the production of "their" cocoa ³ .

Chocolate production disrupts the ecosystem and destroys the environment.

Just as in the case of avocados, for which entire tracts of forests are cut down, farmers are doing the same with cocoa bushes. These need shade to grow, but naturally occurring trees and other plants are cut down to make more space for growing cocoa trees. This causes the plants to become weaker and their life cycle, vitality and productivity changes. Farmers cut down more trees when their cocoa trees grown in full sun stop producing abundant harvests. ⁴ . Between 1990 and 2017, the area under cultivation increased in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire from 2.3 million hectares to 5.8 million hectares ⁵ . This, in turn, leads to changes in the composition of the soil, which becomes poorer and less fertile, loss of biodiversity, changes in rainfall and other negative effects on the ecosystem. Deforestation causes very negative climate changes to accelerate rapidly .

That's not all, because all the costs also include piles of garbage . Chocolates, bars and wafers are usually packed in plastic, which is known to be non-biodegradable and slowly poisoning the planet.

Therefore, when buying products containing cocoa, it is worth paying attention to certificates: choose those with the UTZ, Rainforest Allinace, Sustainable Agriculture Network or Fairtrade International markings . By purchasing products marked this way, we can be sure that they meet many criteria related to ethical production and contribute to the destruction of the environment to a much lesser extent.

Bibliography:

1. Skwirowski P., “Poland is a growing global chocolate power”, Rzeczpospolita, rp.pl, September 23, 2021.
2. “Assessing Progress in Reducing Child Labor in Cocoa Growing Areas of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana|, NORC at the University of Chicago, norc.org, accessed May 31, 2022.
3. Whoriskey P., Siegel R., “Cocoa's child laborers”, The Washington Post, June 5, 2019.
4. Brack D., “Towards sustainable cocoa supply chains: Regulatory options for the EU”, fern.org, June 2019.
5. As above.