VIDEO: "The CNN Freedom Project: Ending Modern-Day Slavery" looks at child slavery and chocolate

"Chocolate's Child Slaves" - The CNN Freedom Project

Early last year, CNN started a project that takes a hard look into the reality of slavery in today's world. The CNN Freedom Project: Ending Modern-Day Slavery investigates all types of human trafficking occurring around the world from the sex trade to forced labor. Most recently, it has turned its focus on the issue of child slavery in the cocoa industry. Their recent documentary, "Chocolate's Child Slaves" aired this past Friday, Jan 20th. Below are some clips as well as other CNN videos relating to the topic...

Chocolate's Child Slaves

Working in cocoa fields at 10

Admitting slavery exists in cocoa fields

Teaching fair trade practices to kids

The ethics of chocolate

Paying more for fair-trade chocolate?

How to buy ethical chocolate

VIDEO: Chocolate The Bitter Truth - Ivory Coast Child Trafficking (BBC Investigation)

*Documentary in 5 parts...

"Chocolate - The Bitter Truth 1 of 5 - Ivory Coast Child Trafficking - BBC Panorama Investigation, recorded 08.05.2010 We spend more on chocolate each year than investors spend on gold - but as Easter approaches, how much do we really know about where it comes from or how it is made?

Panorama reporter Paul Kenyon goes undercover as a cocoa trader in West Africa and discovers children as young as seven working long hours on cocoa farms, helping to make the chocolate we love so much. He buys a tonne of cocoa made with child labour, and sees how easy it is to sell it into the supply chain which leads to our high streets.

He also helps rescue a 12-year-old boy - trafficked across borders - to pick cocoa as a modern-day slave and reunites him with his mother. For the first time, we meet the kids who harvest our cocoa but who have never tasted chocolate.

Tracing the bitter truth of chocolate and child labour, Panorama reporter Paul Kenyon poses as a cocoa dealer to uncover the extent of child labour in the chocolate trade.

Read more at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rqm4n."

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VIDEO: Fair Trade Chocolate - End Child Slavery in Western Africa

"Sometimes silence is the easiest way to express simple points..."

VIDEO: Chocolate Country (documentary)

Can't believe we missed this film...

"In the isolated hill towns of the Dominican Republic, cacao farmers have been fighting a losing battle with the global economy (and hundreds of opportunistic middlemen) for as long as anyone can remember. “Chocolate Country” is the story of a village with a plan to turn the system on its head. Like many poor farmers, the people of Loma Guacanejo have never been able to afford herbicides or pesticides. Shifting demands in the first world are about to turn this disadvantage into an advantage. If the farmers can certify their cocoa beans “organic”, and leverage the benefits of "Fair Trade", their product could instantly double - even triple - in value...

What the Loma Guacanejo cooperative is fighting for amounts to a win-win situation for consumers and growers. For consumers, it provides an alternative to the unsanitary and unappetizing conditions of conventional production, where cacao is dried on roadside tarps and exposed to rain, mold, car exhaust and wandering livestock. For growers, it promises a fairer, more direct relationship with the marketplace, and a better income for households where running water is still a rarity and electricity a far-off dream."

~ ChocolateCountryFilm.com

VIDEO: People & Power - Hot Chocolate

As if economic imbalance and child labor aren't bad enough in the cocoa industry, this report by Al Jazeera shows how cocoa also play a large role in the violent conflicts of the Ivory Coast. Like conflict diamonds, there is conflict cocoa.

Part 1


Part 2