The Bitter History of Chocolate

24:38Nevinson followed the path of workers who were brought from the interior of Angola, where it's green and humid, towards the highlands nearing the coast where it's very dry and arid, basically a desert. He wrote about everything he witnessed. He saw skeletons of people who dropped dead along this recruiting route. You can die in a day in the desert if you're walking across Angola.

25:07That path is strewn with dead men's bones. You see the white thigh bones lying in front of your feet, and at one side, among the undergrowth, you find the skull. These are the skeletons of slaves who've been unable to keep up with the march, and so were murdered or left to die. and he saw wooden shackles even as you come down to the river you find slave shackles hanging on the bushes so these would be a kind of yoke that went across your shoulders and held your hands and sometimes your feet were shackled just enough so that you couldn't run away but you could walk you find shackles of various ages some quite new with the marks of the axe fresh upon them some old and half-eaten by ants.

26:01And he can't unsee what he's seen.

26:19I passed a procession of 43 men and women, marching in file like carriers, but with no loads on their heads.

26:31Four natives in white coats and armed with guns accompanied them, ready to shoot down any runaway on their way to the ship for Sal Tome. At this time, slavery was technically illegal in Portugal and all of its colonies. So Nevinson wanted to understand how these workers ended up in shackles. Some were desperate for work and entered into contracts they didn't understand. Others were forced into labor because they'd broken arbitrary laws like loitering. He even got to witness workers being taken into possession by their employers. They are asked whether they go willingly as laborers to Sal Tomei.

27:13No attention of any kind is paid to their answer. In most cases, no answer is given. Not the slightest notice would be taken of a refusal.

27:44Henry Wood Nevinson followed the workers on their journey across the sea to the island of Sao Tomei. By the time he gets there, he's extremely ill. Following that path nearly killed him, right? Disease, thirst, hunger. But none of that stopped him from filing stories.

28:06The islands possess exactly the kind of climate that kills men and makes the cocoa tree flourish. It is a hothouse, climate-burning heat and torrents of rain in the wet season. stifling heat and clouds of dripping mist in the season that is called dry. He sees the people who had survived this labor recruitment process. He sees, you know, people are dressed kind of in identical clothing. Women have head scars and blouses and striped cotton skirts and men have wraps made of the same material.

28:44One early morning at São Tomé, I went out to visit a plantation. There were 400 slaves on the estate, not counting children. I saw them clearing the forest for further plantation, clearing the ground under the cocoa trees, gathering the great yellow pods, sorting the brown kernels, which already smelt like a chocolate box.

29:14One of Nevinson's biggest challenges was that he didn't speak Portuguese or any African languages, so it was hard for him to conduct interviews. But one day, he was able to have lunch with a plantation doctor and the plantation manager who spoke French, a language Nevinson did speak. The death rate on this Rocha, he remarked casually during the meal, is 12 or 14 % a year among the service A's. What the Portuguese called workers. And what is the chief cause, I asked. Anemia, he said. That is a vague sort of thing, I answered. What brings on anemia? Unhappiness, he said.

30:05He visited multiple plantations all over the island. On one of the largest and best-managed plantations of São Tomé, the superintendent admits a children's death rate of 25%, or one quarter of all the children, every year. It's not possible for him, objectively, to look at those people and not think, these people have been enslaved. Thus it is that the islands of São Tomé and Princip have been rendered about the most profitable bits of the Earth's surface, and England and America can get their chocolate and cocoa cheap.

31:02Henry Wood Nevinson arrived back in England in 1905, a month before the Harper's series was published. He came back from this experience saying that unequivocally this was unfree labor. It was slavery by another name. This is Carla Martin again. Where people were experiencing significant corporal punishment, that they were not receiving the basic kinds of shelter, medical care that they would need, that they were being pressed into these contracts in entirely unethical ways, and that the working conditions in which they spent their time were profoundly brutal. The following year, Nevinson put out a book that was a collection of all the reports from his time in Angola and São Tomé.

31:49It was called A Modern Slavery. Outrage from the public towards the chocolate companies was immediate. At this point in time, the British people have decided, largely as a group, that they are anti-slavery. And the Cadbury Company is a perfect example of a Quaker firm that is purportedly against labor abuses. It's part of how they've kind of made their name and won trust among the British people. So as British consumers are learning about this, they begin pressure campaigns against the Cadbury company. Things like consumer boycotts, letter writing, etc.

32:35This is where things get weirder. Okay, so what the general public might not have known at this point is that William Cadbury had already started his own investigation into slave labor on cocoa plantations. representations. Remember back in 1904 when he'd rejected Henry Wood Nevinson? He shuts the door and thinks, oh gosh darn, I better find somebody else to do this. So he starts looking earnestly for his own representative to send. He finds a private investigator that was not like Nevinson. From William Cadbury's perspective, he felt that Nevinson went into the project determined to prove it was slavery rather than to consider other options.

33:19So he gives him financial support and asks him to go to Africa and look into this. But Cadbury's investigator takes the opposite route as Nevinson. He starts in Sao Tomei and eventually makes his way to Angola. Initially, he didn't know if what he was seeing was slavery. But by the time he finished his journey in 1907. He basically agrees with Neveson completely. This is a quote from the investigator's report. If this is not slavery, I know of no word in the English language that correctly characterized it.

33:59For Cadbury, it was a personal affront. This notion that his cocoa might have been produced by slave labor. He was also a businessman, and he needed a free source of cocoa. Henry Wood Nevinson's reporting created an international scandal, an absolute PR nightmare for the Cadbury Company. People were wondering, how can this Quaker company with these progressive values be using slave labor? But the thing was, William Cadbury already knew through his own investigator that slavery was happening in São Tomé, and he'd privately been pushing both the British and Portuguese governments to end it. Yet, publicly, he went on the offensive.

34:45The Cadburys actually sue a newspaper based on what they consider libel. The newspaper is The Standard. A conservative paper. And they accuse Cadbury of lying. An article was published by The Standard arguing that the Cadbury Company had known for years that there was slave labor in São Tomé, but did nothing to intervene. So they actually go through a very public court case where they're saying, you know, you can't say this about us. Cadbury basically argued that they'd been fighting to end slavery in Sao Tomei, and so the implication that they'd been hiding it from the public intentionally was libel.

35:21The jury found the standard guilty, the newspaper, the standard newspaper guilty of libel against Cadbury Company. The court essentially finds, okay, yes, maybe there was some libel here, but we're only going to award you. One farthing, which is one quarter of one penny. As a way of showing that we actually agree that you've done something wrong and you need to take action on this problem. So they're basically saying you are hiding this information. And so for the Cadbury's, this immediately becomes a kind of ideological problem. It does not suit the way that they see themselves or interact with the world.

35:58But it also, over time, becomes a public relations problem.

36:07Cadbury genuinely did not want his chocolate to be produced by forced labor. So his motivation was, and this is a pun on Cadbury pure chocolate, his motivation was pure. So obviously he had corporate interests, but he also had religious interests. So as they're determining what to do to leave South May, they are also investing heavily in the Gold Coast, a British colony, which goes on to become Ghana, to make sure that they will have a backup plan for their cocoa. How do I employ free farmers who freely produce cocoa and make a more substantial profit for their cocoa? How do I make Cadbury cocoa pure again from a business perspective and from a Quaker perspective?

36:56And so rather than relying on these contracted, indentured, unfree laborers, they're relying on free entire families working on small scale farms where children, parents, adults, you know, older adults are all part of producing cocoa. In 1909, the Cadbury Chocolate Company announced they would no longer source their cocoa from Sal Tomei. Instead, they would begin working with small-scale free farmers in West Africa, where the weather suited cocoa production. It is actually what has now become the tradition throughout the world of cocoa production. It is small-scale family farming.

37:47Sao Tomei would go on to lose its place as the largest producer of cocoa in the world. The Cadbury name eventually recovered from the scandal. Henry Wood Nevinson became a correspondent during World War I and is today considered one of England's most legendary journalists. The new system used by the Cadbury's for cocoa production in West Africa lasts until today, but not without its own set of problems.

38:23Coming up, we speak with the son of a cocoa farmer from Ghana about the reality of child labor in chocolate.

38:46Hi, this is Megan from Newport, Rhode Island, and you're listening to Throughline by NPR. Part three. Amazing Grace. There are today five to six million cocoa farmers around the world. About two million of them are in Ghana and Cote d 'Ivoire. This is Carla Martin again. She's a lecturer at Harvard University. And the vast majority, 90 to 95 percent of them, are small-scale farmers working on a plot of land that you could walk around in a matter of minutes. These farmers are the ones who make the cocoa that goes into most of the chocolate products we love. If you buy hot cocoa, a chocolate bar, a chocolate bunny, and it does not explicitly say on the package what country it came from, the chances are that that is a blend of cocos from different parts of the world.

39:49The majority of that blend will be sourced from West Africa. Okay, so what's the big deal? Chocolate production was moved to West Africa and put into the hands of independent, small-scale farmers in order to avoid slave labor. That is true. But as the 20th century went on, demand for chocolate increased. So basic market economics here, pressure was put on farmers to keep up with that demand by creating more supply. But as they did that, prices either couldn't keep up with inflation or went down, which meant doing more work for less money. They were not being paid for their labor, but rather for the weight of the commodity that they produced.

40:34And so that's at least part of that kind of calculus that was being made strategically about why to, in many ways, push for small-scale farm production of cocoa.

40:51And as the pressure went up to produce more cocoa, farmers had to do whatever they had to do to increase that production, even having their children work. Child labor could be something like my mom, when I was a kid, telling me to take out the trash, which was, you know, beneficial to my maturity, a way of me being involved in household chores. There are, however, other kinds of child labor that people have agreed upon internationally should be eradicated because it is labor that is seen as morally or physically injurious to children. There are cases where these worst forms of child labor take place, and they take place in a couple of different ways.

41:33In a small number of cases, these are taking place via the trafficking of children from one country to another or one region to another, where they They are forced to work as unfree laborers on cocoa farms. And these are often vulnerable children who don't have any other recourse or way to kind of escape this system of labor. According to Walk Free's Global Slavery Index, about 16 ,000 children a year are trafficked in Ghana and Ivory Coast to work on cocoa farms. They're usually forced to work for free on farms that don't belong to their own families. But this is not the majority of child labor cases.

42:16The majority of cases where children are working on their family farms and they are experiencing injury because they might be carrying something that's too heavy for their developing musculoskeletal systems. They might be exposed to pesticides. They have developing lungs. And this is the most common form of child labor that exists in cocoa.

42:50When I was a kid, I knew. My siblings and I, six of us, we had our job cut out for us. All we knew was just, at that time, you know, you work hard if you want to make more and, you know, you can have a good harvest and you can get some good sales. This is Shadrach Frimpong. I am one of six children of Cocoa Farmers. I grew up on the farm, saw electricity when I was maybe like in my teens. Shadrach is from a village in the western part of Ghana where there are a lot of cocoa farms. It's insane. If you have over 3 ,600 communities, right? And almost 850 ,000 cocoa farmers in a country that has a little over 30 million people.

43:31That's a lot of the population. He has fond memories of growing up in the cocoa farming village. It was a simple, peaceful life, a lot of discipline and structure, because it's about survival in those settings. There's not much luxury. One thing I appreciated growing up, the sense of communalism is insane. Over there, I can go into anybody's house and eat. I can go into people's house and then somebody can see me. Hey, what are you walking around? Come help me out on my cocoa farm. Let's go. Cocoa farming has actually been in Shadrach's family for generations. We were told as young people that you have to continue the legacy.

44:07It's a spiritual thing. There's blessings and all of that attached to it. So it goes beyond just food and revenue to, you know, a spiritual thing where, you know, keeps blessing the family life. Shadrach might have just stayed in Ghana and been a cocoa farmer himself. But something happened to him when he was a kid. Something that happens to lots of kids who work on cocoa farms that altered his life's path.

44:35When I was a kid, at one time I had an infection on my legs. And unfortunately, the year I got infections and things were getting really horrible and my legs were getting swollen, that was the same year my family had a bad harvest. Shadrach's family, like many other cocoa farmers in Ghana, despite working very hard, didn't really have any rainy day funds. They were forced to leverage everything they had to pay for his medical care in a hospital hours away. That's what they did. They put their family land as collateral, got me to the nearest health facility. When we went, they were like, you came so close to getting it amputated.

45:11He was lucky. They saved his leg. He was about nine or ten. But he realized just how shaky his family's financial situation was. I mean, it just dawned on me, like, seeing how helpless my parents were. you know the rest of my siblings were going to struggle to feed and you know and I became acutely aware how vulnerable families like mine and where because at the time my father started thinking of you know maybe my older brother may have to go you know work on other people's farms to help the family so you see the child labor effect begin to kick in and so for me the thing it gave me at that time was, man, a family member is sick.

45:56The implications are insane.

46:07That led a fire under my belly to just, I remember going to school and I was, I think I just went from like the, you know, not caring, super chill, to just being like a beast. I went to school, took it super serious. I became uber competitive. At night, he would stay up late studying, using the family's lantern. Just like do my homework steady. When I went to high school, same fire. He did so well that he won a scholarship to study at a prestigious boarding school in Ghana. After high school, he moved to the United States and studied biology at UPenn. At the University of Pennsylvania, we had one class.

46:45And the professor, he gives a lecture on the biology of food. And then he talks about cocoa and how chocolate and everything. And then he pulls up a slide and he's like, well, you guys know, Ghana is the second leading exporter of cocoa. You know, the country makes like billions of dollars. I'm sitting there like, hold on, buddy. What are you talking about? If cocoa farmers are that crucial, how come we're so poor? Shadrach was able to bring his father to Pennsylvania to see him graduate. This guy has worked so hard all his life. His first time leaving the city, he gets out, gets on the end, and he sort of flies all the way to the U.S.

47:24He comes over, and I'm like, buddy, Hershey is down there. Hershey, Pennsylvania, home of the headquarters of Hershey Chocolate. It's not far from UPenn. He sees a chocolate bar for the first time. He's seen how all his hardware can sweat literally translates into this bar. He goes like, man, I had no idea. And then he tastes chocolate and gives me that look. Oh, that is different than the seed that we plant. Today, Shadrach is finishing his medical degree at Yale. And he also started a nonprofit aimed at improving the conditions for people on cocoa farms in Ghana. He wants to help end child labor in the cocoa industry once and for all.

48:06And he told me his story from his childhood that he still uses as motivation. When I was in elementary school, one of my classmates, my own cousin, she was called Grace, and she was the brightest student in the class. Well, one time apparently we had my uncle was sick. My uncle, you know, is a cuckoo farmer, gets sick, never had any health coverage, nothing, bad crop year. Guess what happens? Grace gets pulled out of school and then she goes to work on the farm, never came back. And so years later, I'm at an Ivy League institution. I call my parents and I'm like, where is Grace? You know, she at Harvard.

48:45Maybe give me her number. I'm at Penn. If I'm at Penn, she should go to Harvard. Give me her number so I can call her. My mom said, what are you smoking? Are you all right? Like, she has kids, is working on some cocoa farms, still working on the farms. And, you know, she's still struggling to live on less than a dollar a day. And that hit me so hard. He thought, well, if I'm here having this chance to make a difference in medicine, what would Grace have been able to do? She was smarter than me. And when children like Grace have their chance at education taken away because they have to work, it hurts more than just them or their communities.

49:23And I bet my last dollar that chances are that the cure for cancer is in the mind of the child of a Cocoa Famous kid sitting somewhere. but because they never get opportunity and the injustices they face kick them into child labor and all of these situations all of us we miss out

49:52i i said what a powerful way to put it do you want people when they hear your story to think about that, about that potential and about the hard work people have put in to create ultimately this product, chocolate? I hope that especially in these very tumultuous times, as a world, we can see that, you know, we all want people, we can come together and great things can happen. And most importantly, we can make great things happen for the very few people, for the very people who make sure we get our chocolate and stuff, you know, and we all love, it's getting winter, it's coming. Everybody's going to get hot chocolate.

50:27Every time they sip hot chocolate, hopefully they can remember my parents. But I keep saying, you know, these cocoa farmers, they have the same vision and dreams, like the CEO of Hershey and Nestle. And we should never forget that.

50:43Over the last several decades, the chocolate industry, including companies like Cadbury, Nestle and Hershey, have worked with nonprofits and the Ghanaian government to reduce child labor. And they support a company called the International Cocoa Initiative that has the goal of reducing child labor in the cocoa supply chain. They have had some success. But despite these efforts, hazardous child labor is still a fixture of West African cocoa farming.

51:32That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. I'm Ramtin Arablui, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me. And... Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Karayama. Irene Noguchi. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Passages from Henry Wood Nevinson's writing were read by Sebastian Walker, another amazing British journalist. Also, thank you to Johannes Durgey, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes...

52:20Naveed Marvi. Sho Fujiwara. Anya. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughlineatmpr.org. And make sure to rate us and leave us a comment on Apple or Spotify. It really helps other people find the show. Thanks for listening.

52:55Thank you.