Chocolates Child Slaves premieres Friday 20th January
A decade after agreements and pledges were made to end the worst forms of child labor in the West African cocoa plantations, CNNs David McKenzie in a CNN Freedom Project investigation travels deep into the heart of the Ivory Coast, the worlds largest cocoa producer, to find out exactly what progress has been made. In September 2001 after a series of reports highlighted human trafficking and physical abuse in West African cocoa farming, which supplies an estimated 35% of the worlds cocoa, the global chocolate industry signed the Harkin-Engel Protocol, or Cocoa Protocol, an international agreement to end child labor in the production of cocoa. However, ten years on after the protocol, with the promised certification system that would ensure chocolate was free from the worst forms of child labor still not in place, CNN exposed, an industry which remains, for the majority, unchanged. What they discovered was shocking: a human trafficking network and farmers using child labor and a country bitter from an industry offering low prices and little more than broken promises. Chocolates Child Slaves premieres Friday 20th January, 8pm GMT, 9pm CET.
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