On the eve of Halloween week, John Oliver focused his main segment of Last Week Tonight on the abuses of the chocolate industry, which rakes in about $140bn a year.
Oliver acknowledged that a segment on chocolate sounds like it could be pleasant: “You might be sitting at home thinking ‘Hold on, I’ve seen this show before, this feels like this could be one of those fun stories but is it about to take a turn? I’ve got a jumbo bag of fun-sized Snickers that I’m going to be handing out to tiny Elsas and Luigis in around 48 hours, are you gonna make that weird for me?’ Well, yes, yes I am.”
Unfortunately, “for all the money and happiness surrounding 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,” he continued. Most farmers, he noted, haven’t ever tasted chocolate because they can’t afford it. More than 60% of cocoa comes from two west African countries, Ivory Coast and Ghana, in which 30-58% of residents earn a gross income below the World Bank’s extreme poverty line.
“There’s something a bit weird about a product so synonymous with spreading joy and giving babies what’s basically a cocaine rush, abandoning those who grow its key ingredient to grinding poverty,” said Oliver. “Even if you had a sense that cocoa production had issues, the truth is, from the land it’s grown on to the workers who harvest it, it is worse than you may realize.”
Oliver delved into the basics of the cocoa industry, which is mostly grown on small family-run plots and cultivated by hand. Though there are many small farmers, the industry is dominated by a handful of cocoa trading companies: Cargill, Barry Callebaut and OFI, which together buy and process about 60% of the world’s cocoa. They sell to a small group of chocolate companies, including Mars, Hershey, Mondelēz, Ferrero and Nestlé, 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,” Oliver explained, which is why just 6% of a chocolate bar’s value returns to the farmer.
Companies add real value to the process, he noted, “but there are clearly massive disparities in who reaps the benefits of this extremely profitable industry.” Though mechanisms exist to stabilize the division of profit, such as minimum prices for cocoa, they are difficult to enforce and not enough to offset the costs of farming.
Such costs lead to illegal farming, environmental damage and a reliance on child labor, long the unspoken standard in the chocolate industry. Oliver returned to 2005, when the US Congress attempted to pass legislation setting a deadline for eradicating child labor in the chocolate supply chain, which companies kept pushing back year after year. “At that point, why bother setting a deadline at all?” Oliver wondered. “If your friend agrees to meet you for dinner at 7, then pushes it to 7.30, then 8, and then finally says ‘be there in 20, years not minutes,’ it kinda feels like they never had any intention of getting dinner in the first place.”
Companies have internal initiatives to support fair trade, but “the reality hasn’t remotely lived up to the rhetoric,” said Oliver, citing one investigation that went to one address on Mondelēz’s Cocoa Life website in 2022 and immediately found child laborers harvesting cocoa pods without protective clothing. “I don’t know what statement Mondelēz could release in the wake of that other than maybe ‘Honestly, did not think anyone would actually check,’” Oliver joked.
Third-party auditors also give advance notice of inspections, “which is clearly ridiculous, because that’s never going to be reliable”, Oliver exclaimed. “If you tell your teenager, ‘I’m checking your backpack for cigarettes next Tuesday,’ then great news: you’re not going to find any.
“All these companies will say that they’re concerned about child labor and that they’ve spent a lot of money trying to fix it” – an estimated $150m by 2019. “But that’s over 18 years, and while they were collecting $103bn in sales annually,” Oliver noted – 0.1% of one year’s sales. “C’mon, M&Ms must have spent more than that fine-tuning how fuckable the green M&M is,” he quipped.
Child labor is “an open secret” in the supply chain, Oliver concluded, though he conceded that abolishing it is “really complicated. Child labor in this region 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 be to pay farmers more.
“I know these are companies, not charities, whose job it is to make money, not save the world,” he added. “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.”
