Investigation exposes BITTER truth behind Cadbury's iconic Creme Eggs

Easter is coming and it's a great time for chocolate companies. Now, supermarket shelves are filled with chocolate eggs, with Cadbury leading the industry. Their classic creme egg is a seasonal favorite with 200 million sold every year and each one comes with the Cocoa Life stamp, to reassure consumers that the ingredients are 'ethically' sourced.

But that might not always be right. Channel 4’s Dispatches has uncovered shocking child labor abuse behind these favorite chocolate treats and, for the first time, linked them directly to the Cadbury supply chain. Reporter Antony Barnett, during his investigation in Ghana, West Africa, met children as young as 10-year-olds performing work on cocoa farms in the sweltering heat, for up to nine hours a day. Small children wielding 3ft machetes hacked through tough weeds, with no protective clothing, or crack pods with long sharp knives, and many sustained serious injuries from the hazardous work. The daughter of one farmer, claimed to be supplying Mondelēz, said she had sliced her foot open while using a long machete.

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A girl of around 14 also revealed she had been trafficked from the north of the country by her aunt who told she would be looking after younger children and learning to be a seamstress. Instead, she was denied a chance at schooling and made to toil in the cocoa fields.

The farmers were paid less than $2.63 (£2) a day for the cocoa they sold to Mondelez, the US company that now owns Cadbury. In a conversation with the Sun, Barnett told, “The farmers are paid so little they can’t afford to hire adults to work on the farm so they have to use their children. So they took them out of school to work on the farm. But there were also cases where it wasn’t children belonging to the family, but they’d been brought from elsewhere to work on the farm.”

Under Ghanaian law, it’s illegal for children under 13 to work and nobody under 18 should be involved in hazardous work. But at the first farm Barnett visited, he found brothers of 10 and 11 knocking cocoa pods from trees with long poles. There are a lot of children working to support their families, and some of the parents keep their children out of school so that they can work in these cocoa fields.

Barnett said, “From what we saw, child labor was everywhere. We didn’t have to go looking for children working on farms; we visited four farms in 12 days, during the harvest, and found evidence of child labor on every one. The farms are very remote and hard to get to, so we were limited in our scope, but had we visited more farms, I believe we would have seen more. It seemed to be endemic in my view.”

But, Mondelez, Cadbury’s parent company strongly refused to respond to these allegations that they profit from child labor. They even pointed out that they aim to help these cocoa farmers and Cadbury set up Cocoa Life in 2012, to help raise the standard of living for cocoa farmers and their families and stamp out child labor.

A Mondelēz International spokesperson said: “We’re deeply concerned by the incidents documented in the Dispatches program. We explicitly prohibit child labor in our operations and have been working relentlessly to take a stand against this, making significant efforts through our Cocoa Life program to improve the protection of children in the communities where we source cocoa, including in Ghana. The welfare of the children and families featured is our primary concern and we commit to investigating further so we can provide any support needed. As part of our Cocoa Life program, we have child labor monitoring and remediation systems in place in Ghana, which means community members and NGO partners are trained to provide assistance to vulnerable children, and once identified, we can help to address any cases of child labor.” The company will lso conduct its own investigation.

But after a decade, it’s estimated that 1.56 million children are involved in cocoa production in Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire, with 95 percent of them involved in hazardous child labor, according to the latest report from the National Opinion Research Center. The report also states that despite pledges from chocolate companies including Cadbury, the proportion of children between the ages of five and 17 involved in cocoa labor has actually risen in Ghana from 44 percent to 55 percent since 2009.