500 signatures reached
To: Mars CEO Poul Weihrauch, Nestlé CEO Ulf Mark Schneider, major chocolate company CEOs
Mars and Nestlé: Stop using child slave labor in your chocolate NOW!
Americans purchase $13 BILLION worth of chocolate each year, but what most people don’t know is that popular chocolate companies like Nestlé and Mars use slave labor from (often trafficked) African children to produce their chocolate products.
The chocolate industry has missed deadlines to eliminate child slavery from their cocoa supply chains in 2005, 2008, and 2020. It’s outrageous, unacceptable, and an egregious human rights violation. We cannot allow them to keep getting away with this.
Will you take action now and sign my petition to demand that Nestlé and Mars stop using child slave labor NOW?
Why is this important?
Children are often abducted from their homes and later sold to cocoa farmers, potentially never to see their families and loved ones ever again. Most of the children are 12-16 years old, but reporters have found children as young as 5 years old, many of whom are forced to work up to 14 hours a day. And when children attempt to escape, they are beaten and tortured. It’s unacceptable.
Children forced to work on cocoa farms often use machetes to cut cacao bean pods down from trees and then pack them into 100-pound sacks and when they’re full, they have to carry them. Aly Diabate, a former enslaved cocoa worker said, “Some of the bags were taller than me. It took two people to put the bag on my head. And when you didn’t hurry, you were beaten.”
The chocolate industry has a revenue of over 254 BILLION dollars per year, yet, even though it is estimated to only cost the industry a little over 5 million dollars a year to trace cocoa beans to track where their cocoa is coming from, there has been little interest in the technology from any chocolate company. It’s shocking, but not surprising.
Greedy corporations in the chocolate industry like Nestlé and Mars have enough money to pay workers a living wage AND ensure that they DO NOT use child slave labor. But instead, they are prioritizing their corporate profits. No more.
Major chocolate companies have claimed to be concerned and to make efforts to end child slave labor, but they are a multi-billion dollar industry, but it’s been over two decades since they were exposed, and there is still child slavery in their supply chains. It’s wrong.
Together, we can keep getting loud and pressuring chocolate industry companies like Nestle until they end child slave labor once and for all.
Will you take action now and sign this urgent petition?
Image credit: Duchesse layenah