Chocolate: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

our main story tonight concerns chocolate the star attraction in Neapolitan ice cream nothing against vanilla and strawberries just that one is a euphemism for boring sex and the other is fruit and fruit is simply not dessert chocolate is the greatest just watch as this baby get a first taste of it okay one more one more really big one ready are you ready yeah baby same and and I hope it Savers that chocolate High cuz I think we all know the rest of Human Experience is pretty much downhill from there everybody loves chocolate that is why

we use it for everything from beauty products to sculptures to breakfast cereal although some arguably love it a little too much like the host of this cooking show there's a component a substance and chocolate called fenel ethylamine and what that fancy word does is it slightly elevates your blood pressure and your heart rate and they tell me that it's a sensation that's not unlike having an orgasm I don't know maybe that's why people love chocolate so much but anyway let me get back to our step here okay first what a long weird way to tell

people that you've never had an orgasm second I can't believe that there is a chem chemical that makes your brain horny and they named it pheny ethyl aine that is not a sexy name Erol seducti lust dat aceline all of those are free and available and just to be very clear eating chocolate is nothing like having an orgasm unless you count the fact that when boys do it it is Messier but chocolate isn't just making people horny it's also making a lot of money globally it's a $140 billion a year industry and at this point

you might be sitting at home thinking hold on I've seen this show before this feels like it's going to be one of those fun stories but is it about to take a turn I got a jumbo bag of fun-sized Snickers that I'm going to be handing out to Tiny Iron Men elers and Luigi's in around 48 hours are you going to make that weird for me well yes yes I am and also don't me half of that bag is going to be gone by Halloween and you know it but the reason this is about to

take a turn is for all the money and happiness surround in chocolate there is one group that doesn't get to share in it and that is the farmers who grow cocoa in the first place the vast majority have never even tasted chocolate and that is something that reporters and documentarians love to try and remedy on camera and perhaps not as patronizingly as this these Farmers have been growing beans for decades they're about to get their first taste of chocolate you have never tried chocolate no that is your Coco well well to those who thought that

I'm the most annoying version of a loud man on TV with a British accent looks like you owe me an apology because that is pretty condescending right there attention forward subjects we noticed that you've not once tasted the fruit of your interminable toil so allow me to present you with a generous gift of a single kid cat that is your C go and the reason most Farmers haven't tried chocolate before is they can't afford it more than 60% of Coco comes from just two West African countries Ivory Coast and Ghana and researchers have found that

in those places between 73 and 90% of Coco farmers do not earn a living income with 30 to 58% earning below the world bank's extreme poverty life and there's something a bit weird about a product so synonymous for spreading joy and giv giving babies what's basically a cocaine Rush abandoning those who grow its key ingredient to grinding poverty because even if you had a sense the Coco production had issues the truth is from the land it's grown on to the working conditions of those Who harvest it it is worse than you may realize so given

that as we prepare for our annual tradition of stuffing as much of it in our faces as humanly possible tonight let's talk about chocolate and let's start with the fact that Coco is mostly grown on very small family run plots they're about half a million of them in Ivory Coast and another 800,000 in Ghana harvesting cocoa pods is labor intensive and done entirely by hand and by the way what's inside them may not be what you are picturing in your mind Evan's kenoi cracks open the pods to extract the sweet slimy Bean which at this

stage has a flavor like leechy fruit once the cocoa is collected it's left to ferment under banana leaves for about 7 Days yeah that slimy bean soup is cocoa chocolate starts out as gluey white insect lava that comes out of a big tree egg and it's only after a long process that that fermenting forages becomes something more appetizing or in the case of a mountains bar even less appetizing from the farm the Coco then passes through a number of hands on its way to the chocolate companies from the people who collect the beans to the

warehouses who store them each of whom gets paid for their part in the chain but at a certain point they all feed into one narrow bottleneck as this expert explains in an almost unnervingly soothing Way by a away the story of chocolate is a little bit like an hourglass where you have millions of small holders growing cocoa at the very beginning of the story and at the end of the story you have millions of consumers eating chocolate but right at the center of The Hourglass are a handful of extremely powerful companies these companies are the

Coco Traders okay that was a very good description of how the industry works from what I can only assume is a 9-hour YouTube video entitled woman explains Coco sector inequality ASMR fall asleep now high quality headphones on but it is true the industry is dominated by just a handful of Coco trading companies the most powerful of which are the so-called big three Cargill Barry calbot and ofi which together buy and Pro about 60% of the world's cocoa they then sell to a handful of major chocolate companies Mars mes which owns cabry Ferrero nesle and Hershey

which together sell over half the world's chocolate and when you have so many farmers and so few buyers the buyers clearly have a big advantage that is why only about 6% of the value of a chocolate bar makes its way back to the farmer and look I'm not saying that those companies aren't adding real value to their part of the process they are are this Halloween try offering a Spider-Man a Kit Kat or a handful of sticky white bean lava and see which they prefer but there are clearly massive disparities in who reaps the benefits

of this extremely profitable industry and I will say there are mechanisms in place to at least help stabilize the amount that farmers earn both Ghana and ivory Co set minimum prices the farmers receive for their Coco the problem is those prices are not only difficult to enforce but crucially they're often not enough to cover the costs of farming and so some Farmers most of whom remember are experiencing extreme poverty have resorted to trying to increase their earnings by growing more cocoa on land that is protected by the government which is illegal because it can do

significant environmental damage desperate Farmers supplement their crop by growing cocoa trees in a protected Forest where the uncultivated soil is more fertile and stolen land is in effect free of charge What's Left Behind is known as a skeleton Forest okay let's face it it was only a matter of time before the phrase skeleton Forest appeared on this show because if there is a Sinister combination of words out there we're going to stumble over it tumor elections ghost abuse murder pollution stay tuned all those are coming up but it's not just environmental damage there is also

significant human cost in Coco farming which has been well known for a while around 20 years ago a series of news stories and a documentary found that young children some of whom had been enslaved or trafficked were working on Cocoa Farms that supplied major chocolate companies and in the wake of public horror over this companies didn't do themselves any favors with how they responded just listen to the answers that this Dutch journalist got when he asked Nestle about whether children were involved in making its chocolate children are working in virtually every single agricultural uh uh

setup around the world yes okay as a matter of fact when I was 11 or 12 years old I went to help a farmer I did not get paid paid for it I did it because I I thought it was it was uh fun that was child labor a child working and that's the same it's not the same it's evidently I didn't I didn't need to do that okay yeah right not to stress the most obvious point in the universe but doing something for fun isn't the same thing as doing it to survive is the

difference between being in an escape room and being in a Saw movie sure they're both equally bad first date ideas but that is where the similarities end and look I'll give him this a lot of child labor does consist of kids working on their own family's Coco Farms though even in those cases they can be doing so in hazardous conditions and also watch as that Nestle spokesperson accidentally walks into a pretty damning admission of exactly why they might have been having to do that in the first place for a poor farmer in in in in

Africa often the help that he gets from his children is vital in order to maintain the standard of living of the family because they they because they are so desperately poor because they don't get paid enough by Nestle or by the companies they work for that's thank you very much wow it is very funny to me that he thought ending that call when he did was somehow avoiding implicating himself look the farmers have to make their children work for them because they are so poor because they're not paid a living wage by Nestle the company

that I you know what nice try you're breaking up I'm going through a tunnel goodbye that was a close one I think I got away with it and again it's not just kids working on their family farms children have been known to be forced or trafficked to work in Cocoa production while because of the nature of this crime exact numbers aren't known one survey estimated that in Ivory Coast over a 4-year period 2,000 children were victims of forced labor while in Ghana it was 14,000 and back in the 2000s outrage over this actually spurred us

lawmakers to take action first they considered mandating labels for chocolate indicating whether or not it was made with child slave labor but the chocolate industry then lobbied that down to a voluntary agreement to eliminate the worst forms of child labor promising to get it done by July 2005 that agreement later became known as the harken Engle protocol after the two lawmakers who had pushed for it but when the deadline rolls around Senator Hawkin had this unfortunate update though I was disappointed that the July 1st deadline was not fully met by the industry they have given

us a commit a commitment to achieving a certification system which can be expanded across the Coco growing areas of West Africa and which will cover 50% of the Coco growing areas of Ivory Coast and Ghana in three years time I am very pleased with this commitment wait are you because if so I genuinely jealous of your infinite capacity for trusting others ah I see from the first panel of today's Peanuts comic that Lucy is finally going to let Charlie Brown kick the football while I was disappointed by her actions in the past it seems that

a new day has brought a sense of Integrity within this young girl and I'm very excited to move my gaze down the page and see this commitment honored in while she did it again and predictably the companies didn't meet that new deadline either once 2008 rolled around they kicked it to 2010 then pushed it again to 2020 while simultaneously downgrading their goal to just getting a 70% reduction in child labor rather than eliminating it entirely then they missed that deadline too and the companies almost certainly knew that they wouldn't be keeping their promises here as

the former head of the international Coco initiative put it was there any chance of child labor being eradicated by the original 2005 deadline no never and at that point why bother selling a date at all if your friend agrees to meet you for dinner at 700 then pushes it to 7:30 then 8 and then finally says be there in 20 years not minutes it kind of feels like they never had any intention of getting dinner in the first place and I will say it is not like the chocolate companies have done nothing they all started

flashy looking programs with Coco in their names that promised to be vigilant about monitoring for child labor and they produced impressive looking ads featuring happy farmers and websites showing how carefully they monitor their supply chain but the reality hasn't remotely lived up to the rhetoric just last year some journalists looked at a map of farms on meles's Coco life website and then sent a camera crew to GH to check some out and you'll never guess what they found it didn't take long to find children working on a farm matching the coordinates listed on the Coco

life website the team filmed two to young boys age 10 and 11 harvesting cocoa pods using long sticks with sharp hooks and wearing no protective clothing it's true they went to just one of the Farms listed on their site a site filled with claims that child labor is completely unacceptable and instantly found child labor and I don't know what statement meles can release in the wake of that other than maybe honestly did not think anyone would actually check and you think well obviously we can't trust companies to monitor themselves that's why there should be a

third party involved the thing is those have also existed for years chocolate companies have long purchased at least some of their beans from third-party organizations like these who certify the farmers who Supply them have met certain child labor and environmental standards you might have seen one of these logos on a chocolate bar and felt reassured by it but while Advocates say that some of these organizations have improved conditions somewhat these logos just aren't the guarantee that you might want them to be for a start while the organizations pay Farmers a small premium for meeting their

standards those premiums might not even cover the cost of complying with the program but also typically inspections for the labels are required of fewer than one in 10 Farms annually and just watch what happened when reporters went undercover as Chocolate Company Executives and visited a contractor who did audits for OOTS one of those thirdparty organizations because he explains to them exactly why he is so confident that he won't find child labor on any farm that he visits the audit is announced in advance you go and visit producers who know that you're coming when you go

to them you are not going to see any children that is true Auditors give advanced notice of inspections which is clearly ridiculous because that's never going to be reliable if you tell your teenager I'm checking your backpack for cigarettes next Tuesday then great news you're not going to find any now I have to tell you OTS has maintained that it holds Auditors to the highest standards although you have just seen those standards and I don't know about you but they didn't seem that high to me as for mes who remember turned out to have child

labor at one of its supplies in Ghana it said that it was deeply concerned by these incidents and okay that makes two of us mes it also wants you to know that it has a child labor monitoring system in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening which is very reassuring until you remember it only took a documentary crew one flight to GH to prove that that system is at best deeply inadequate and that is the thing all these companies will say that they are concerned about child labor and that they've spent a lot

of money trying to fix it by one estimate as of 2019 they spent more than $150 million to address this issue but that's over 18 years and while they were collecting 103 billion in sales annually meaning that over two decades they've spent just .1% of one year's sales and come on M&M's must have spent more than that fine-tuning exactly how the green &m is and and for all the company's claims of concern the fact remains according to the US Department of Labor an estimated 1 and a half million children work in Coco production in Ghana

and Ivory Coast many of whom are engaged in dangerous tasks or as a Washington Post investigation concluded the odds are substantial that a chocolate bar bought in the United States is the product of child labor in fact the Persistence of it in the supply chain is an Open Secret just watch as some young workers end up joking about it when asked by visiting [Music] journalists oh yeah we all fondly remember being 21 small frame childlike voice another guy has to constantly remind you that you're 21 just classic early 20s stuff and I know they were

laughing there and that clip was honestly kind of charming but the truth is for others the stories are pretty harrowing like this young girl who said that at this point she'd already been farming Coco for 5 years I was brought here by my aunt I was told I would be helping with the baby but instead I only do farming she says she wants to go to school but her uncle can't afford to send her my uncle says he struggles to pay for his own children so if I join them he will not be able to

buy the school books we asked if she misses her family yes do you hear from them no have you ever been back to visit them since you came here no that is heartbreaking and the truth is there are a lot more Clips out there like that one than there are of kids joking around about being 21 and at this point you might be wondering well what can we do differently and I will admit it's really complicated child labor in these regions is caused by a myriad of issues from poor infrastructure to limited access to education

but to a significant extent it is caused by poverty a poverty that is actively perpetuated by these chocolate companies and if they really want to remedy things a good first step would simply be to pay Farmers more and companies might bulk at that saying that they don't set the price the market does but as this Advocate points out that's a pretty lousy excuse every Trader and every multinational I speak to always say oh but that's the world market price we have no influence on that at all but you buy a quarter of the world's cocoa

beans how can you not influence the price exactly and look I am no Economist despite winning most likely to be an economist based on appearance back in preschool but if you buy that much of the global Supply in something you definitely have some sway over how much it costs and the thing is there are models here that companies could look to remember that Dutch journalist making the guy from Nestle squirm as a result of that segment he actually created his own Chocolate Company Tony's chocola lonely it works hard to ensure that its supply chain is

free from child or slave labor and importantly ensures that the people who grow its cocoa are in dire poverty here is its former head of sustainability explaining how it sets the price for the beans that it buys we calculate how big the Gap is between the government set price and the living income price and we pay that Gap as an extra premium for the spring harvest the premium was about $63 higher than what set by the government meaning Tony's paid almost double for each bag of beans that's great and it says something that Tony's Were

Somehow able to pay farmers double the going rate despite being a midsize Dutch Coco company whose logo by the way looks like a casual dining restaurant operated by and for clowns if these guys can do it there's frankly no reason why these guys can't as well and to be fair even Tony's own website admits the scale of the challenge here saying we have never found an instance of modern slavery in our supply chain however we do not guarantee our chocolate is 100% slave free while we are doing everything we can to prevent slavery and child

labor we are also realistic and I have to say I appreciate that because there is a difference between recognizing how much there is to do and simply not doing enough and I know these are companies not Charities whose job it is to make money and not save the world but that means that they will only care about this problem exactly as much as they are forced to so if we are serious about getting child labor out of our chocolate we can't keep relying on Pinky promises and the honor System we need tough legislation that requires

companies do the right thing and it's not like this is the only industry where exploitation in other countries is the norm I could just as easily I've done this piece about coffee or palm oil and we actually talked about trafficking and child labor in the US farm system this year but experts themselves say of chocolate in few Industries is the evidence of objectionable practices so clear the industry's pledges to reform so ambitious and the breaching of those promises so obvious we have known for 20 years what the problems are here and we haven't bothered to

fix them but if we do then imagine this one day maybe just maybe we can get back to a point where chocolate can once more give us the simple uncomplicated Joy of this exactly