The world's chocolate companies depend on cocoa produced in West Africa with more than 1 million child laborers, according to a new report sponsored by the Labor Department.
The findings represent a remarkable failure by chocolate companies to fulfill their long-standing promise to eradicate the practice from their cocoa supply chains.
Under pressure from Congress in 2001, some of the world's largest chocolate companies — including Nestle, Hershey and Mars — pledged to eradicate "the worst forms of child labor" from their sources in West Africa, the world's most important supply. Since then, however, the firms have missed deadlines to eliminate child labor in 2005, 2008 and 2010.
Each time, they have promised to do better, but the new report indicates that the incidence of child labor in West African cocoa production has risen.
It is unclear whether the United States will continue to monitor whether the companies ever succeed in eliminating child labor, as they had promised. The so-called Harkin Engel protocol, which is the formal name for the chocolate company promise, negotiated by Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), will expire next yea