The truth about where your chocolate comes from

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WHEN it comes to the way most of us consume chocolate, it’s pretty fair to say not a lot of deep thought goes into the process.

There’s the pang of hunger and a craving for the bittersweet treat that creeps into the mind and stomach. Then comes the bargaining, convincing yourself you’ve eaten well for most of the day or worked hard to deserve it, plus there’s definitely time to work it off at the gym later.

Once the decision has been made and the decadent dessert dispensed, it’s off with the wrapper and straight in the gob, chomped down as quickly as guilt will allow.

Deliciously simple, right? But what most of us don’t realise is there’s a complex process the cocoa that goes into our chocolate bars goes through before it ends up in the office vending machine, and it might make you think twice about how you next choose to consume your favourite treat.

To find out the truth about where our chocolate really comes from, news.com.au was invited by the world’s biggest confectionary manufacturer, Nestle, to the cocoa producing capital of the world.

Half way across the globe, deep in the sub-Saharan African republic of Cote d’Ivoire — the Ivory Coast — we discovered a complicated, at times confronting, and even heartwarming story that lies behind a Kit Kat wrapper.

Down long stretches of powdery orange dirt road, where women carrying enormous loads on their heads and babies on their backs, and men bearing balance-threatening bundles strapped to rickety bikes travel between impoverished villages that branch out from the up-country highway, is where it all begins.

Many of the narrow paths that lead off the road to small communities continue into dense, leafy cocoa plantations, where huge yellow pods are grown and picked by local farmers, many of them continuing the family business started many generations before them.

The beans extracted from cocoa pods, picked off by machete-wielding farmers before being fermented in a banana-leaf bed and dried out in a weeks-long process, are the Ivorian economy’s biggest resource and export.

Raw and roasted cocoa beans, cocoa butter and cocoa paste account for about a third of Cote d’Ivoire’s export market, with many villages relying on cropping and selling the product as their only means of income.

As cocoa farmer Jeannette Brou Konan, who grew up in cocoa country and has owned and managed her own plantation in the southwestern Gagnoa area for five years, tells news.com.au through a translator: “My father was a cocoa farmer and I come from a farming family, most of us do. It’s just what we do.”

The chocolate industry, including major players like Nestle, has been forced to deal with child labour in its supply chains for years.

Cote d’Ivoire has a history of the long accepted practice of children engaging in dangerous and difficult work on rural cocoa farms.

A report released last year by the Fair Labor Association found around 20 per cent of farms used by Nestle on the Ivory Coast from September to December 2014 were using child labour.

Researchers visited 260 farms and found 56 workers under 18 - the legal minimum age for “hazardous” work. Of those, 27 were under the age of 15.

The FLA found evidence of an underage worker receiving no pay for a year’s work on a cocoa farm in the Divo region. The researchers found farmers put young family members to work, unpaid, treating them as “apprentices”, and also witnessed workers forced to carry heavy loads and some bearing machete bruises.

With the country’s development only recently re-emerging after being stunted by civil war since before the turn of the century, bringing the industry into a modern, more ethical age of industry and eradicating the practice has been slow.

Farmers spoken to by news.com.au described a time not too many years ago where children would be sent into sweltering plantations carrying sharp, heavy machetes to hack at trees, and were forced to carry heavy loads of produce at the orders of their parents, while never attending a day of school. In the worst reported cases, there have been claims of children being whipped and abused to encourage more productive work, and allegations of child trafficking, where children were reportedly imported to rural Cote d’Ivoire to work.

“(Child labour) used to be everywhere,” farm owner Mrs Konan tells news.com.au.

“It was accepted because people lacked knowledge. They didn’t know that it was bad for the children, but now you hardly ever if at all see any children in cocoa farming thanks to sensitisation.”

Cocoa farmers were once easily tempted to put their kids to work in the farms. With few rural villages serviced by local schools, and education hardly valued by workers who saw limited career opportunity for their kids beyond the farm, children were seen to have little else to do.

It made sense to parents who wanted assistance to have them help out, even if it meant them handling dangerous tools and working more than their bodies could handle.

In more recent times, as consumer focus has turned to ethical consumption and companies have become more conscious of their social responsibility, there are far greater incentives for farmers to get their children off the fields and into the classrooms.

Farmers are encouraged to gain certification from bodies like Utz and Fair Trade, which assess and monitor ethical and sustainable business practices, vetting producers for child labour practices among other strict criteria.

Jean-Marie Dolon is the sustainability manager for Cargill, the country’s biggest cocoa trader. He says the trader, which acts as a go-between buying products from certified producers and selling to companies like Nestle, has a plan in place to source 100 per cent of its cocoa from producers certified and proven to use no child labour by 2017.

Like Nestle and other players in the Ivorian cocoa market, the company has recently upped its efforts in social responsibility, and says it is working with other organisations to wipe out the child labour practices that have been accepted in communities and ignored by businesses for generations.

“In the past what we were doing, it created farmers who are hypocrites,” Mr Dolon said at a presentation in Abidjan last week.

“They were told it was wrong, so there were farmers everywhere who when they would see white people, they would hide their kids, but they would be like ‘why don’t they want our kids to work with us on the farm’. What we do now is educating them to better understand what they can do with kids on the plantation and what they cannot.”

As part of the industry’s push for sustainable and ethically sourced, quality cocoa, industry body the International Cocoa Initiative has organised community awareness or “sensitisation” sessions to educate community members about child labour.

At a sensitisation seminar hosted by the ICI and attended by news.com.au, cocoa farmers who supply to Cargill and Nestle were quizzed on what they regarded as safe practices for children regarding carrying heavy loads, spraying pesticides, participating in burn offs and using dangerous tools.

It seems like basic stuff, but hearing correct answers to those questions — having children not participate in any of the mentioned activities and only helping out with simple tasks at times when they shouldn’t be in school — is a sign of big change for cocoa companies and traders, it’s taken a long road to shift these attitudes.

“I would have no excuse to stand in front of you and say we are paying a premium to someone who is working with his kids involving him in the worst forms of child labour,” Mr Dolon said.

“Knowing today if a farmer says to us the place of my kid is in the school, that’s already a major step for us because there are some places where you would go the farmers would never even think of taking his kid to school so for us there is already an important change.”

There’s a widely accepted attitude among consumers of junk food that falls in line with the saying “we don’t need to know how the sausages are made”.

But due to a wide range of production standards and product quality in the controversy-plagued industry, heavy-hitters in the cocoa business are encouraging chocolate-lovers to shift their thinking.

“Consumers are more and more conscious of where their food comes from, this is what we’re noticing, and chocolate is the same,” Nestle Cocoa Plan global manager Nathan Bello said to news.com.au.

“It’s also the responsibility of the industry to look at the supply change and basically tackle the issue of child labour and gender and also those kinds of issues that may raise and block the business.

“It’s made us work closely with the producers themselves so we know just where the product is coming from, and working with them to produce the product in a sustainable manner.”

Through its Cocoa Plan, with Mr Bello, a former Fair Trade executive, at the helm, Nestle has begun to fulfil its vision of “supporting the lives of cocoa farmers and the quality of their product”.

In training farmers and supplying them with the materials to run profitable farms, assisting with solutions to child labour, building school facilities and promoting gender equality, there are clear examples of how Nestle is making differences in the lives of cocoa farmers and their families.

But it’s not charity. Nestle is a business with a product to sell, and through the program the business aims to achieve sustainability in its cocoa supply chain. By equipping farmers with tools to deliver a higher yielding, better quality crop, Nestle wins and so does its consumers.

Other confectionary companies have started social responsibility initiatives aimed at avoid a predicted cocoa shortage that routinely makes headlines, but also improving living and working conditions for producers.

Mr Bello says the project still has a long way to go, and child labour is still the biggest issue.

“We still see it, many times,” he said.

Mr Bello also believes the farmers deserve credit for the labour that goes into producing the snacks we gluttonously consume and take for granted, as the farmers try to work their way out of poverty.

“The physical quality is important and the cocoa business is not as easy as we all think. It’s difficulty to get the final cocoa beans and it’s a lot of work and a lot of patience, so maybe it’s fair that has to be recognised somewhere, that these people are making so much effort to keep people in their hobby of eating chocolate.”

Not that the farmers know exactly what they are doing. Just like many consumers are ignorant of the story behind the treats they mindlessly, but satisfyingly, gobble down on cheat day, Ivorian farmers give little regard to where the beans they work so hard to produce end up.

Aline Konan has been running her own cocoa farm for roughly 10 years, but when asked by news.com.au what she thought the chocolate her beans became, she said in translated French, “it looks like cocoa, it’s logical”.

After taking a bite of a mostly melted Kit Kat under the harsh African sun on the red soil path that circles her village, her first ever taste of the final product of her harvest, all she could say was “C’est bon … tres’ bon! (it’s good ... very good!)” while grinning and licking her sticky fingers.

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