SXSW Panel Recap: Changing the Chocolate Industry??
(Source – Austin Chronicle) — It’s important that we consciously consume chocolate. It’s pretty depressing when someone hands you a delectable bar of Belgian chocolate and then informs you that moment of savory goodness may actually be contributing to child slavery.An estimated 60% of all cocoa in the world is produced in the Ivory Coast and Ghana on 2.5 million small farms. There are 2.3 million children who work on these farms, and “90% work in illegal circumstances,” said Ynzo Van Zanten, the “Choco Evangelist” of Tony’s Chocolonely. As for the rest of the farmers who work legally, they earn around 50 cents a day. For a $5 bar of chocolate, that means “no more than 12 cents ends up in the hands of the farmers who grow cocoa,” explained Van Zanten.
There’s a lot more nuance to the topic than can be found in this article, and the presentation is skewed by Tony Chocolonely’s interests promoting their view, IMO.
To read the full article, click the link below, and then let us know what you think in the comments below.