Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) leads the world in production and export of the cocoa beans used in the manufacture of chocolate,[1] supplying 46% of cocoa produced in the world. West Africa, collectively supplies nearly 70% of the world's cocoa crop, with Côte d'Ivoire leading production at 1.3 million tonnes, followed by neighboring Ghana with 720 thousand tonnes.[2][3] Côte d'Ivoire overtook Ghana as the world's leading producer of cocoa beans in 1978.[4] Large chocolate producers such as Cadbury, Hershey's, and Nestle buy Ivorian cocoa futures and options through Euronext whereby world prices are set.[3]
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Cocoa is a shade-loving tree native to the understory of rainforests, growing at low elevation in the foothills of the Andes, and the great South American equatorial river basins the Amazon River Basin, and the Orinoco River Basin. The tree is a choice crop for areas of West Africa with low to slight elevations, good soils, and the constant humidity of the tropics.
| Top Cocoa Producers in 2004 |
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| (million metric tons) | |
| Côte d'Ivoire | 1.33 |
| Ghana | 0.74 |
| Indonesia | 0.43 |
| Nigeria | 0.37 |
| Brazil | 0.17 |
| Cambodia | 0.13 |
| Ecuador | 0.09 |
| World Total | 3.6 |
| Source: UN Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO)[1] |
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The crop is grown in Côte d'Ivoire mostly by smallholder farmers planting on 1-3 hectares.[5] The pods containing the beans are harvested when a sufficient number are ripe, opened to separate the seeds and pulp from the outer rind, and the seeds and pulp are usually allowed to ferment somewhere on the farm, before the seeds are dried in a central location. The dried seeds are purchased by a traitant or buyer who travels among villages in an area to weigh, purchase and collect the crop. The traitant then takes the crop to a short-holding warehouse in a major town or city where the major exporters purchase the seeds and arrange for its export from Côte d'Ivoire. The entire process requires the labored contribution of a variety of workers, from the farmer who owns the fields, to his laborers who may be slaves and often include family members, to others in the village who harvest pods to ferment seeds at the same time, to the local buyers, and the middlemen between these purchasers and the exporters who finally get the crop to an export ship.
Côte d'Ivoire and other West African cocoa producing nations have come under severe criticism in the west for using child slave labor to produce the cocoa purchased by Western chocolate companies. The bulk of the criticism has been directed towards practices in Côte d'Ivoire. The report "A Taste of Slavery: How Your Chocolate May be Tainted"[6][7][8] claims that traffickers promise paid work, housing, and education to children who are then forced to labour and undergo severe abuse, that some children are held forcibly on farms and work up to 100 hours per week, and that attempted escapees are beaten.[6][7][8][9][10][11][12] A BBC article claimed that 15,000 children from Mali, some under age 11, were working as slaves in cocoa production in Côte d'Ivoire, and Mali's Save the Children Fund director described "young children carrying 6kg of cocoa sacks so heavy that they have wounds all over their shoulders."[13] In 2001 Chocolate Manufacturers Association acknowledged that slaves harvested some cocoa.[11]
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