Hot Cocoa

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In September the company introduced Hershey's Extra Dark, a chocolate bar that contains an unprecedented (for Hershey, anyway) 60 percent cacao content and bears "The Antioxidant Seal," a stamp that displays an image of a cacao bean and announces the contents to be a natural source of antioxidants. What's more, Mars Inc., purveyor of M&M's and Snickers, recently created a new division called Mars Nutrition for Health & Well-Being and launched CocoaVia, a line of self-described heart-healthy snacks that boast a high antioxidant content.

Although market forces have nudged Big Chocolate on the road toward higher-end products, companies like Mars, Hershey, Cadbury Schweppes, and Nestle -- and, for that matter, the aforementioned premium companies, Ghirardelli, Lindt, and Perugina -- still haven't made a meaningful move toward fair-trade chocolate. Under fair trade, beleaguered cacao bean farmers, the vast majority of whom tend small family farms and cannot withstand mercurial global market forces, are guaranteed a stable, minimum price, not to mention fair labor and environmental standards.

Some supporters say that fair labor might also help stamp out child slavery and child labor on cacao farms, especially those in Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), a West African nation that produces more than a third of the world's cocoa, and where long-standing abuses include the purchase and enslavement of children as young as 9 years old to harvest the beans.

In 2001, soon after major news outlets first documented the reprehensible practice, most of the global chocolate companies pledged to uphold the Harkin-Engel Protocol, a voluntary measure that gave the companies until July 1, 2005, to develop a system that would certify cacao beans used in their various products to be free of slave labor. But that deadline came and went without much action, says Trina Tocco, a program assistant with the International Labor Rights Fund, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization.

"Like most voluntary corporate responsibility, time flew by and still there were barely even pilot projects set up in Cote d'Ivoire," says Tocco. Production timetables and quality standards are one thing, Tocco adds, but when it comes to child labor, the companies drag their feet.

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