For many folks who celebrate Halloween, including for the CAL team, the holiday is a stark reminder of how much is wrong with both our international food systems and our legal frameworks regulating--and failing to regulate-- corporate behavior. How, in 2020, can it be possible that nearly every piece of candy in a trick-or-treater’s bucket arrived there after a long journey that harmed both people and the planet?
Single-use costumes, plastic wrappers, and disposable decorations often involve supply chain human rights abuses and are a burden on the planet. Despite this, Halloween is a huge money maker, including for major confectionary brands. Even amidst the pandemic, candy companies are pushing for Halloween as usual this year, and US consumers are breaking candy-buying records.
This post focuses on a few of the negative impacts associated with key ingredients in Halloween candy: cocoa (forced child labor; deforestation), sugar (forced displacement; forced labor; excessive water use), milk (climate change; abusive working conditions), and palm oil (deforestation; human rights abuses).
All of these human rights and environmental considerations can be paralyzing for consumers who want to do the right thing. And that sentiment is warranted-- we can and should do our best to choose the most sustainable options available. While CAL doesn’t endorse any chocolate companies, we recently filed two amicus briefs on behalf of nineteen cocoa and chocolate companies in a Supreme Court case about alleged forced child labor in the cocoa supply chains. (You can find the two briefs here and here.) The briefs -- and therefore these companies -- support corporate liability for overseas human rights abuses. While it’s great that these companies are fighting for corporate liability, the reality is that we need systemic change on a global scale so that no candy produced at the expense of people or the planet is allowed on grocery store shelves.
In this post, we lay out human rights and environmental abuses in the supply chains of common ingredients in Halloween candy: cocoa, sugar, milk, and palm oil. We then offer some considerations for conscious consumers to take into account while candy shopping, all the while recognizing that we as a community of global citizens are not going to be able to buy our way out of this scary reality.
Cocoa
In the early 2000s, the cocoa industry gained notoriety for using child labor. Despite decades of corporate promises, much remains the same. In 2001, cocoa companies signed a voluntary agreement, the Harkin-Engel Protocol, agreeing to eradicate child labor in their supply chains by 2005. Without making fundamental changes to the way they operate, these companies failed to do so -- and then failed to meet the 2008, 2010, and even 2020 goals they set for themselves. In fact, the most recent report from the US Department of Labor found that the prevalence of child labor in cocoa-growing households in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, the world’s top cocoa exporting countries, actually increased by 14 percent over the past decade, from 31 percent to 45 percent.
At the same time, forced child labor (and forced labor of adults) remains a massive problem in the cocoa industry. As was true back in 2001, today children are trafficked and forced to work on cocoa farms. While it is very difficult to find data on forced laborers, one study estimates that there are 16,000 forced child laborers in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire working on cocoa farms and another 14,000 adults in forced labor on cocoa farms. And this likely greatly underestimates the true number of forced laborers involved in producing the cocoa that is eventually turned into Halloween candy.
Besides perpetuating illegal and abusive forms of labor, the cocoa industry also contributes to deforestation, including in protected forests. While deforestation contributes to climate change and decreases animal populations, the fact that cocoa farmers illegally expand their farms into protected forests to produce more cocoa (because they can’t make ends meet cultivating just their own farms) is an open secret from which companies like Cargill, Olam, and Barry Callabaut profit.
Deforestation, forced and child labor are all parts of a broader systemic problem: cocoa farmers simply don’t earn enough to live on. Until companies pay cocoa farmers more, they will continue to try to earn enough money to survive at any cost -- by encroaching on protected forests, having their children help out on the farm, and even using forced labor.
Unfortunately, even Fair Trade, UTZ, Rainforest Alliance and other types of certified cocoa doesn’t guarantee that farmers are paid enough to support their families -- or that their children go to school or have a safe place to sleep. In fact, our research has found that farmers in West Africa producing certified cocoa are subject to identical conditions as farmers on non-certified farms.
Sugar
Sugar, which comes from both sugarcane and sugar beet, is also produced in supply chains rife with labor and environmental abuses, including forced and child labor. According to the Department of Labor’s List of Goods Produced with Child Labor or Forced Labor, sugarcane and sugarbeet are produced with forced and/or child labor in at least 20 countries across the Americas, Asia, and Africa.
Conditions on sugar plantations are often dangerous and laborers are badly paid. Workers often live in unsanitary housing, have wages withheld, are forced to work overtime, and are not allowed to unionize. They can work in dangerously high temperatures and suffer serious health impacts from pesticide exposure. Additionally, companies have forcibly displaced communities to acquire land for sugarcane. For example, in 2006 a Cambodian sugar company illegally confiscated land from a community, displacing them. More recently, Central Romana, a Dominican sugar company owned by a US sugar giant, the Fanjul Corporation, forcibly displaced a community in the Dominican Republic. This past January, a group of community members who had been displaced from their homes sued Central Romana in federal court.
Sugar production also weighs heavily on the environment, requiring massive amounts of water to produce a single pound of sugar. Runoff in the form of fertilizers and silt can also contaminate water suppliers as well as local ecosystems in reefs. Sugarcane production has also led to deforestation, especially in Brazil, the world’s largest sugarcane producer.
Milk
Like cocoa and sugar, producing milk causes all sorts of problems, both for workers and for the environment. Dairy cows account for two percent of all greenhouse gases produced in the US. Additionally, most of the milk drunk in the US is produced in dairy sheds with 1,000+ cows that also store large amounts of cow manure. If not stored properly, runoff from the manure can harm the surrounding environment, including community water sources.
Dairy production, especially in the US, often relies on a primarily migrant -- and often undocumented -- workforce. With no legal backing, undocumented workers are vulnerable to labor exploitation, something that happens far too regularly. And in most states, labor laws do not apply to agricultural workers or are rarely enforced, further limiting workers’ legal protection. This leads to dairy workers working long hours with little rest, living in substandard housing, and earning wages that are often below the minimum wage.
Milk with Dignity, a worker-driven social responsibility program based on the highly successful Fair Food Program, is instituting structural changes to improve working conditions for dairy farmers in Vermont. While Ben and Jerry’s has joined the program, it only covers a small number of workers so far, and no candy producers have joined the program yet.
Palm oil
Palm oil is a key ingredient in almost all processed foods, including in candy bars, and we again see widespread harms to both the environment and to workers in palm oil supply chains. Palm oil is a particularly difficult product to avoid consuming, since it appears not just in candy but nearly half of all grocery store products (and many cosmetics). It’s also hard to spot since there are more than 200 names for palm oil and derivative ingredients.
Palm oil is primarily grown in Indonesia and Malaysia and often produced by workers in debt-bondage and by children, none of whom earn enough to live on. In a recent Associated Press investigation into palm oil working conditions in Indonesia and Malaysia, almost all of the 130+ workers interviewed reported having experienced abusive treatment on the job. And last month the US government banned palm oil imports from one Malaysian palm oil company based on a reasonable belief that the company was using forced labor.
Palm oil has also led to deforestation, especially in rural and indiginous areas. Indonesia reportedly lost 24 million hectares of forest cover (about the size of the UK) to palm oil plantations between 2001 and 2017. Not only was the land deforested, but much of it was taken from communities in violation of local laws requiring community consent.
Here again, social auditing certification hasn't worked. For example, palm oil plantations that are certified as “sustainable” by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil have been found to have egregious human rights abuses.
Where can we go from here?
Facing these disturbing realities, people in our community often turn to CAL for insight on what they can buy in good conscience. Unfortunately, we don’t have a clear cut answer to this practical question, and we’re unaware of any mass-produced candy that is proven to be fully environmentally and socially sustainable in practice-- not just rhetoric (although we’d love to be wrong on this).
What we can say is that we recently filed two amicus briefs on behalf of nineteen cocoa and chocolate companies in a Supreme Court case about alleged forced child labor in Nestlé USA and Cargill’s cocoa supply chains. While CAL does not endorse these or any companies, this group of amici are walking the talk in that they support corporate liability for overseas human rights abuses and aren’t asking for a pass based on their corporate status. Nestlé USA and Cargill, on the other hand, have been fighting tooth and nail to dodge liability for aiding and abetting human rights abuses in Cote d’Ivoire and corporate liability under the Alien Tort Statute generally for fifteen years.
At the end of the day, consumers are not well-situated to determine supply chain sustainability. And they shouldn’t have to be. What conscious consumers can do is make informed choices based on companies’ track records (not just PR), and join the broader fight for corporate accountability for human rights and environmental abuse. Our world needs binding legal regulations to hold corporations accountable so that consumers don’t have to wonder which candy is produced in less-horrifying conditions and know that their choices are cabined by corporate responsibility for harming people and the planet.
Avery Kelly and Allie Brudney are Staff Attorneys at Corporate Accountability Lab.
