By Adrienne Fitch-Frankel
...Even though the chocolate industry committed to ending the worst forms of child labor in cocoa production by today — July 1, 2008 — the slave-free label is still missing from lots of chocolate boxes…and chocolate bars and ice cream and syrup and other products made with cocoa. And it’s not just because industry talked Congress into a voluntary agreement in place of the 2001 legislation that would have created a mandatory slave-free label for chocolate, which was passed in the House of Representatives by a landslide. It is also because virtually none of the chocolate you buy as a consumer could be certified as “slave-free” if that label existed today...
The chocolate industry’s answer to the legislative threat of slave-free labeling was its 2001 pledge to voluntarily certify cocoa produced without the worst forms of child labor by July 1, 2005, known as the Harkin-Engel Protocol, after the two Congressmen who championed the original legislation. When they failed to meet this deadline, it was extended to July 1, 2008 and limited to 50 percent of the Cote D’Ivoire and Ghana...