The world's chocolate companies depend on cocoa produced with the aid of more than 1 million West African child laborers, according to a new report sponsored by the Labor Department.
The findings represent a failure by leading chocolate companies to fulfill a long-standing promise to eradicate the practice from their supply chains.
Under pressure from Congress in 2001, some of the world's largest chocolatiers -- 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.
A Washington Post investigation of the use of child labor in the cocoa industry found that representatives of some of the biggest and best-known brands could not guarantee that any of their chocolate was produced without child labor. One reason is that 20 years after pledging to eradicate the practice, chocolate companies still could not identify the farms where all their cocoa comes from, let alone whether child labor was used in producing it.
The prevalence of child labor among agricultural households in cocoa-growing areas of Ivory Coast and Ghana, the two primary suppliers, increased from 31% to 45% between 2008 and 2019, according to the Labor Department survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.
Nearly 1.6 million children were engaged in child labor in cocoa production, according to the survey, and most of those were involved in tasks considered hazardous, such as wielding machetes, carrying heavy loads or working with pesticides. Because of changes in methodology, the number of child laborers in the new survey is not comparable with that of the first survey, researchers said.
"As this report shows, there are today still too many children in cocoa farming doing work for which they are too young, or work that endangers them," according to a statement from Richard Scobey, president of the World Cocoa Foundation, an industry group representing companies handling about 80% of the world's cocoa supply chain.
In addressing the report, Scobey identified no industry failures. Instead, he suggested that the goals for reducing child labor may have been too lofty.
The targets "were set without fully understanding the complexity and scale of a challenge heavily associated with poverty in rural Africa," he said in his statement.
"Companies alone cannot solve the problem," he said, noting also that cocoa production has increased.
Several nonprofit groups blame the companies, however, for falling far short of the responsibilities they assumed under their pledge in 2001. They question how an industry that rings up an estimated $103 billion in annual sales could have made so little, if any, progress over 20 years.
In December, the Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments in a case against Nestle and Cargill involving a group of Malians who say that as adolescents, they were forced to work on Ivory Coast cocoa farms.
Although the lawsuit and The Post investigation focus on forced child labor, often from children brought in from other countries, the figures in the new report do not count those workers.
The "issue of forced child labor in cocoa production is important and deserves attention," the report says, but counting forced child laborers would require a different methodology.
After The Post story, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials opened an investigation into forced child labor on Ivorian cocoa farms, and sent personnel there. The outcome of that investigation is unknown.
Regarding the lawsuit, a Nestle statement said: "All involved agree that Nestle never engaged in the egregious child labor alleged in this suit. This lawsuit does not advance the shared goal of ending child labor in the cocoa industry because it does not address the root causes of the issue and will not improve the conditions in West Africa."