We should stop eating chocolate to fight child labour

Accepted. =My Argument=Child labour happens to be one of the biggest components in the production of chocolate, largely putting into question the overall ethics of the trade. Upon investigating chocolate production and its relation to unethical child labor, British media outlet the BBC discovered evidence of human trafficking and child slave labour; which means that children are being forced to work without even any pay. Countries such as the Ivory Coast and Ghana supply a majority 60% of the world's cocoa, which including other countries means Western Africa supplies more than 70% of cocoa to the world. These are countries in which countless children are sold as slaves and made to work tirelessly as cocoa pickers. This naturally means that these children are taken away from their families, receive no proper education, and more importantly; are not paid anything for their hard labor. The reason why this is significant is because the African, Asian, and South American countries where cocoa pods [and then beans] come from, are also some of the most impoverished and corrupt. Where children and poverty-stricken families are the most easy to exploit. To gain a further idea of the countries included: - Brazil-Cameroon-Columbia-Dominican Republic-Ecuador-Ghana-Guatemala-Honduras-Ivory Coast-Madagascar-Mexico-Nigeria-Peru-Philippines-Sri Lanka-SamoaAs can clearly be seen, these are again some of the poorest countries out. Alluding further to the child labor and forced slavery, the money that is received by their work all goes to the slave owners and [though in smaller amounts] to the family members that sell the children, some that are as young as five years old. More to the point, the cocoa that these children pick virtually all goes towards major chocolate sellers. The general protocol is that the children pick the cocoa beans, which then get given to the slave owners, who then sell them to exporters and big-brand chocolate companies, which include Cadbury's, Nestle, Mars, and Hershey's. One figure made by the U.S State Department estimated that 100,000 children alone in the Ivory Coast were sent to work in the Cocoa industry. An example of just how corrupt this industry is, are the many cases [particularly in recent time] where human rights organizations and journalists have attempted to expose the large-scale use of child labor, especially in Western Africa, and have been silenced because of it. In 2004, a journalist reporting on government corruption in its profitable cocoa industry was kidnapped and killed, allegedly by the entourage of the Ivory Coast leader. As well as that, in 2010 the Ivorian government authorities detained three newspaper journalists after they published an article exposing government corruption in the cocoa sector. Regarding the conditions that children are required to live in, slave owners and farmers give them the cheapest foods possible, such as corn paste and bananas. Child workers have also been known to sleep on wooden planks in small windowless buildings with literally no access to clean water or sanitary bathrooms. The message here is not for those in the west to be forcefully stopped into eating chocolate, but for there to be more education on as to where the chocolate comes from and who has to spend their childhood working for its production. As well as being educated about it, more effort should be made in safeguarding the chocolate trade and in working to ensure that children are not so easily exploited by slave owners, who in reality are only working on behalf of the big-name companies themselves. Sources: [1.] http://www.huffingtonpost.com...[2.] http://www.amanochocolate.com...[3.] http://www.foodispower.org...[4.] http://www.antislavery.org...