Slavery is alive and thriving, and it’s wrapped inside shiny chocolate bars that promise to be “fair trade,” “child-labor free” and “sustainable.”

In West Africa, which produces more than 60 percent of the world’s cocoa, over 1.5 million children still work under hazardous conditions. Kids, some as young as five, use machetes to crack pods open in their hands, carry loads that weigh more than they do and spray toxic pesticides without protection.

Meanwhile, of the roughly 2 million metric tons of cocoa the Ivory Coast produces each year, between 20 percent and 30 percent is grown illegally in protected forests. And satellite data from Global Forest Watch shows an increase in deforestation across key cocoa-growing regions as farmers, desperate for income, push deeper into forest reserves.

The bitter truth is that despite decades of pledges, certification schemes and packaging glowing with virtue — of forests saved, farmers empowered and consciences soothed — most chocolate companies have failed to eradicate exploitation from their supply chains.

Today, many cocoa farmers in the Ivory Coast and Ghana still earn less than a dollar a day, well below the poverty line. According to a joint report by IDH and True Price, the average farmer earns only 40 percent of a living wage.

Put starkly, as the global chocolate market swells close to a $150 billion a year in 2025, the average farmer now receives less than 6 percent of the value of a single chocolate bar, whereas in the 1970s they received more than 50 percent.

Then there’s the use of child labor, which is essentially woven into the fabric of this economy, where we have been sold the illusion of progress. From the 2001 Harkin-Engel Protocol — a voluntary agreement to end child labor by the world’s chocolate giants — to today’s glossy environmental, social and governance (ESG) reports, every initiative has promised progress and delivered delay.

In 2007, the industry quietly redefined “public certification,” shifting it from a commitment to consumer labeling to a vague pledge to compile statistics on labor conditions. It missed the original 2010 deadline to eliminate child labor, as well as a new target to reduce it by 70 percent by 2020. And that year, a study by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center found that hazardous child labor in cocoa production increased from 2008 to 2019.

“We covered a story about a ship carrying trafficked children,” recalled journalist Humphrey Hawksley, who first exposed the issue in the BBC documentary called Slavery: A Global Investigation. “The chocolate companies refused to comment and spoke as one industry. That was their rule. Even now, none of them is slave-free,” he added.

As it stands, many of the more than 1.5 million West African children working in cocoa production are trafficked from neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali. Traffickers lure them with false promises or outright abduction, offering children as young as 10 either bicycles or small sums to travel to the Ivory Coast. There, they are sold to farmers for as little as $34 each.

And once on these farms, they are trapped. They work up to 14 hours a day, sleep in windowless sheds with no clean water or toilets, and most never see the inside of a classroom.

Last but not least, we come to deforestation: Since its independence, more than 90 percent of the Ivory Coast’s forests have disappeared due to cocoa farming. In 2024, deforestation accelerated despite corporate commitments to halt it by 2025, as declining soil fertility and stagnant prices pushed farmers farther into the forest to plant new cocoa trees.