By Paul Richardson

Child tobacco pickers in Malawi, Africa’s biggest producer of the burley variety of the crop, are being exposed to nicotine poisoning equivalent to 50 cigarettes a day, a children’s rights organization said.

At least 78,000 children, some as young as five, work on tobacco estates in the southern African country, Plan International, a Woking, England-based agency said in a report on its Web site today. They work for up to 12 hours a day and are paid as little as 1 penny (2 cents) an hour, it said.

Child slavery is endemic in the chocolate industry, Geoff White, the New Zealand general manager for Trade Aid, says.

The recent addition of palm oil to Cadbury's chocolate and the implied threat this poses to rainforests and the Indonesian orang-utan has raised a large amount of media attention and consumer backlash.

As it should.

But while concern for the environment and animals is justified, it is unfortunate that a far bigger scandal involving much of the chocolate sold in this country continues to fly under the radar.

By Michelle Smith

...The International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) has a scorecard to assess the progress companies are making in their alleged efforts to stop exploiting child labor. It shows that if chocolate-makers had the same motivation to make chocolate as they are in fighting child slavery, the industry would have crumbled long ago.