TheChocolateLifeLIVE – The Chocolate War 2023

TheChocolateWire - 15 Mar 2023

“Big Chocolate” collectively, publicly acknowledged that illegal labor, including child labor and trafficking, was a problem in their cocoa supply chains in West Africa more than twenty years ago.

By becoming signatories to the Harkin-Engel protocol, forming the International Cocoa Initiative, the World Cocoa Foundation, and other entities, they pledged to fix the problem.

Twenty years on, despite the efforts of tens of thousands thousands of people, thousands of companies and NGO, and despite collectively spending billions in private and public money, the problem is arguably worse today than it was twenty years ago.

Leading the fight to hold Big Chocolate accountable are Terry Collingsworth of International Rights Advocates (“IRA”) and documentary filmmaker Miki Mistrati.

Terry and IRA have been pursuing legal strategies to hold the industry accountable for its knowingly benefiting and profiting from illegal labor. We’ll be discussing the status of those legal actions, including updates from last year’s Supreme Court decision.

Miki may be best known to chocolate fans for the film The Dark Side of Chocolate. U. Roberto “Robin” Romano, a long-time friend of TheChocolateLife before he passed away, was the DP on that film. What The Dark Side of Chocolate, and his current film, The Chocolate War, do is to keep the struggle to hold Big Chocolate alive to members of the public who do not fully understand the scope of human tragedy that is an integral part of many of their favorite chocolate brands and products.

The Chocolate War was recently released to major global streaming platforms:

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Stream on Amazon Prime or AppleTV (subscriptions required).

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Rent or Buy on LetterBoxd or Vimeo.

This release provided a reason to revisit what Terry and Miki have been doing since the last time they were guests on TheChocolateLife. Because of a last-minute schedule conflict which meant Miki would not be able to join Terry and me live on Friday, we recorded an interview that will be played during Friday’s livestream.

Of course, we will be taking questions live from participants, and if there are questions that only Miki can answer, I will forward them to him and post his responses as comments to this post.