Hershey and Child Labor

We call on the Hershey company to take steps to reduce or eliminate abusive child labor from their chocolate supply chains in West Africa.

The Hershey company purchases their main ingredient, cocoa, from West Africa, mainly from Ivory Coast, where they are notorious for abusive child labor. About 89 percent of the children in the Ivory Coast work to get the cocoa. The Hershey Company has not done much against child slavery because it keeps the cost of cocoa cheap, which allows chocolate to be also low of cost.

The children involved with the Hershey Chocolate Company face horrible hard labor. Children chosen to work for Hershey are stolen or purchased from their parents and then sent to the Ivory Coast. Most will never see their families again. In an investigative report by the BBC, they found out that hundreds of thousands of children sold by their parents, sometimes believing that their son or daughter will have a chance for a better life. Most of these children in between the ages of 11 to 16. They work for 80 to 100 and a great quantity of them do not paid. The children wor...