Investigate: The Dark Side Of Chocolate > Investigative

THE DARK SIDE OF CHOCOLATE INVESTIGATE Tuesday 10th August at 8.30pm

Maybe it will after this horrifying documentary of brutal trafficking and illegal child labour in the chocolate industry.

Award-winning investigative journalist Miki Mistrati decides to check rumours about child trafficking and illegal child labour in the chocolate industry. His hunt for answers brings him to Mali, where shocking hidden footage reveals illegal trafficking of small children to the cocoa fields in neighbouring Ivory Cost. Kids as young as seven years of age work in the plantations, where they face a dangerous job cutting down the cocoa and carrying heavy loads.

While leading manufacturers are busy persuading Miki that no children are working in the cocoa fields, Interpol raids a number of plantations and finds more than 60 children working at the farms.

In 2001 consumers around the world were outraged to discover that child labour and slavery, trafficking, and other uses existed on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast, a country that produces nearly half the world’s cocoa. An avalanche of negative publicity and consumer demands for answers and solutions soon followed.

Large international companies like Nestlé and Mars signed the Cocoa Protocol in 2001. An agreement promising to work for a total eradication of child labour in the cocoa sector by 2008.

Almost a decade after the chocolate companies, concerned governments and specially formed foundations have spent millions of dollars in an effort to eradicate child labour and trafficking in the international cocoa trade, has anything changed?

Miki Mistrati and U Roberto Romano launch a behind-the-scenes investigation and verify if these allegations of child labour in the chocolate industry are present today.

Will they document that child labour and trafficked children is still a burden to the cocoa industry? Follow Mistrati into the bush of Africa to expose The Dark Side Of Chocolate, premiering on the Documentary Channel, Tuesday, August 10 at 8.30pm.