Chocolate shouldn't leave a bad taste in your mouth, but that's hard to avoid with evidence that over 2 million child laborers work on cocoa farms in West Africa, helping to produce a significant amount of the chocolate consumed in the U.S.
As far as child labor goes, cocoa work is considered some of the worst because daily tasks include deploying pesticides, chopping with machetes and lifting excessively heavy bags. Impoverished kids sent to work on these farms are subject to body-breaking work and do not attend school.
For two decades, chocolate companies have set goals to eradicate child labor on these farms, but they come up short each time. The efforts and money spent to address this problem have been insufficient, so we call on Hershey's to invest more of the billions in profits made on the backs of underage workers to put a stop to it once and for all.
We will not continue to eat this chocolate if we don't have a guarantee that it's made without child labor.
