One form of trafficking is the use of children to harvest the cocoa beans on farms in Cote D'Ivoire. These children are likely to be working to make your chocolate.  Nearly half the world's chocolate is made from cocoa harvested in the Cote d'Ivoire, in Africa.  Thousands of children have been trafficked into cocoa farms in Cote D'Ivoire
When we buy chocolate we are being

forced to be oppressors ourselves as we do not know that the chocolate we eat is 'traffik free'.

We want all chocolate companies to be able to stamp onto their chocolate wrappers a symbol that tells us the cocoa beans have not been harvested by trafficked labour. We can then choose to eat chocolate that we know is TRAFFIK FREE.

Diabate and Traoré had left their village in Mali to go to Ivory Coast looking for enough money to afford a bicycle, but they were sold to a man who had paid 50,000 West African Francs (about £50) for the two boys and he wanted the money back—in labour. The boys from Sirkasso met about twenty others in the same predicament and learned that no one was ever paid. They slept in a rectangle-shaped mud hut that initially had windows but when some boys found they could escape during the night, the windows were sealed shut. Diabate and Traoré remember eating mostly bananas, though they would gobble up the cocoa beans, as others did, whenever they got the chance. Many months passed, and the boys forgot what the purpose had once been for this adventure. Life became a struggle to exist, then hardened to despair.
They gave up thinking of escape. They were under constant threat of beatings if they were caught trying to flee—and they had seen several boys treated savagely—they were actually spooked by a belief that they were under a spell.

STOP THE TRAFFIK Chocolate Campaign is about ACTION and CHANGE.

Customers need to know who picked the cocoa beans that make chocolate.

Retailers need to know that their customers will change what they buy to force the chocolate industry to change their practices.

The chocolate manufacturers need to realise that this is the time to: 

                                      SIGN THE CHOCOLATE PLEDGE
                                      KEEP THEIR ORIGINAL PROMISES And GIVE US TRAFFIK FREE CHOCOLATE NOW

            WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?

For more information on how YOU can help Stop the Traffic - click here.  

Read more about Diabate and Traore in Carol Off's book "Bitter Chocolate".