In 2010, fair trade organizations Green America, Global Exchange and the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) challenged Hershey, claiming the company sourced its cocoa from farms using child labor. The groups published a report, “Time to Raise the Bar: The Real Corporate Social Responsibility Report for the Hershey Company.” The report was released around the same time as Hershey’s first Corporate Social Responsibility Report (Smith). In 2011, these same groups published an update: “Still Time to Raise the Bar: The Real Corporate Social Responsibility Report for the Hershey Company.”
September 19th, 2011 marked the “10-year anniversary of the signing of the Harkin-Engel Protocol – an agreement made by the country’s largest chocolate companies, including Hershey – to put an end to forced child labor in chocolate by 2005” (Smith). The above mentioned fair trade groups in their update report, claimed that Hershey had not lived up to the agreement as child labor was still an issue in their supply chain. They criticized Hershey’s actions as being superficial attempts to fix the problem, while its competitors (namely Nestle and Mars) have made commitments to only use independently certified cocoa.
The child labor crisis Hershey faces is focused on West Africa – where the cocoa beans are sourced.
– 70% of world’s cocoa is from West Africa, the largest producer.
– About 40% is produced in Ivory Coast with 600,000 cocoa farmers (figure 1).
– Ghana produces about 20% of world’s cocoa with 700,000 cocoa farmers (figure 2).
– At least half a million from Ivory Coast and Ghana are child workers.
– The US department of Labor has identified 5 West African cocoa producing nations as harvested by child/forced labor (figure 3). 3 out of the 5 are Hershey’s major sourcing countries (figure 4).
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Figure 1 & 2:
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Source: Still Time to Raise the Bar: The REAL Corporate Social Responsibility Report for the Hershey Company 2011
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Source: Still Time to Raise the Bar: The REAL Corporate Social Responsibility Report for the Hershey Company 2011
Figure 3:
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Source: Still Time to Raise the Bar: The REAL Corporate Social Responsibility Report for the Hershey Company 2011
Figure 4:
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Source: Hershey 2012 CSR Scorecard
Sources:
Hershey’s 2012 CSR Scorecard
Smith, Sandy. “Groups Claim Hershey Chocolate is Not so Sweet for Child Laborers.” EHS Today (2011)ProQuest. Web. 25 Apr. 2013. <http://remote.baruch.cuny.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/889365231?accountid=8500>
Newman, Tim and Elizabeth O’Connell. Time to Raise the Bar 2011 Edition. September 2011. 24 April 2013 <www.RaiseTheBarHershey.org>.
