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Chocolate: The Bitter Truth
Saturday August 18 at 10 pm ET/PT & Sunday August 19 at 8 pm ET on CBC News Network
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Chocolate: The Bitter Truth
Watch the full film. Please note: This film is only available online for 30 days after the last broadcast date.
45:15 min 
Chocolate is a multi-billion dollar global industry, but, nearly a decade after key players signed a pledge to eradicate child labour, little has been done to implement it. This special investigation highlights the continuing abuse children suffer in the production of chocolate, despite repeated promises of reform.
This film shows that the chocolate industry still supports child labour through its supply chain, that child labour is still rife in the fields and that the industry has made few moves to eradicate it or the child trafficking behind it.
Over 40% of the world's cocoa is sourced from the west African region of Cote d'Ivoire, and the UN estimates that there are around 15,000 children working on the region's cocoa farms. These include children as young as eight years old, many from neighbouring Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana, who are trafficked across borders and used as forced labour.
In 2001 the chocolate industry signed up to the Harkin Engel Protocol in which it promised "industry wide standards of public certification…that cocoa beans and their derivative products are free of the worst forms of child labour".
Reported by Paul Kenyon for BBC.
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