The Big Picture
- Last Week Tonight With John Oliver tackles how chocolate companies take advantage of poverty and lax law enforcement to underpay cocoa farmers and use child labor, while pretending to be unaware.
- Verifying child labor in cocoa farms is easy for the companies – they can just visit farms listed on their company's website, and they'll likely find children working.
- Oliver explains that the government needs to pressure chocolate companies to pay fair prices for cocoa beans and stop exploiting farmers and their families.
With TV fans receiving tragic news over the weekend, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver could do with a bit of a lighter theme, which is why the episode focused on chocolate this week. But wait… if Last Week Tonight is dedicating its main segment to chocolate it's because there’s something wrong with it, isn’t there? Is nothing sacred to this show? Well, apparently not.
The thing about chocolate is that, since it’s a product that practically everyone in the world enjoys, you’d think that the people who supply cocoa beans to chocolate companies would be laughing all the way to the bank. But that’s not the case at all. Cocoa farmers hardly make money to support their families, and that only happens because developed countries like the United States — and probably Willy Wonka as well — imports the fruit from underdeveloped countries like Ghana and the Ivory Coast.
As John Oliver underscores, it’s not hard to do the math of what happens: Big companies underpay the value of their essential product by taking advantage of lax law enforcement and poverty, which will make locals agree to work for long hours and little compensation out of sheer need to have any source of income. This is not exclusive to the chocolate industry, but what stands out about this particular segment is that companies are well aware that their product comes from the hands of child labor and don’t even care about it.
Chocolate Companies Are Not Interested In Investigating Child Labor in Cocoa Farms
As the episode makes clear, chocolate companies have been putting off the responsibility of actively keeping children off cocoa farms for almost two decades, while pretending that this is something out of their control. The episode also demonstrated that all it takes to verify if kids are indeed working in cocoa farms is booking a flight to one of the farms listed on a chocolate company’s website and taking a look around – you’re bound to find one with little effort.
And that’s not to say that adult cocoa farmworkers have it any better – they work with no protective equipment and, if we’re to take other types of farmworkers as the “model,” are probably paid a lot less than they are worth. Obviously, there’s no simple solution to the issue, but there are ways out. The government needs to put pressure on giant chocolate companies so they’ll pay more for cocoa beans – which, in turn, doesn’t force cocoa farmers to put their own family to work to turn a profit. The biggest problem is, nobody seems really interested in putting pressure on chocolate companies.
HBO airs new episodes from Last Week Tonight every Sunday night. You can also catch up with them on Max. Watch the full main segment below:
