Read the following article, and answer the following questions. 2 pages, the whole.

Forty-five percent of the chocolate we consume in theUnited States and in the rest of the world is made from cocoabeans grown and harvested on farms in the Ivory Coast,a small nation on the western coast of Africa. Few realizethat a portion of the Ivory Coast cocoa beans that goes intothe chocolate we eat was grown and harvested by slave children.The slaves are boys between 12 and 16—but sometimesas young as 9—who are kidnapped from villages inExplore the Concept onmythinkinglab.comETHICS AND BUSINESS 65surrounding nations and sold to the cocoa farmers by traffickers.The farmers whip, beat, and starve the boys to forcethem to do the hot, difficult work of clearing the fields,harvesting the beans, and drying them in the sun. The boyswork from sunrise to sunset. Some are locked in at night inwindowless rooms where they sleep on bare wooden planks.Far from home, unsure of their location, unable to speak thelanguage, isolated in rural areas, and threatened with harshbeatings if they try to get away, the boys rarely attempt toescape their nightmare situation. Those who do try are usuallycaught, severely beaten as an example to others, andthen locked in solitary confinement. Every year unknownnumbers of these boys die or are killed on the cocoa farmsthat supply our chocolate.The plight of the enslaved children was first widelypublicized at the turn of the twenty-first century whenTrue Vision, a British television company, took videosof slave boys working on Ivory Coast farms and made adocumentary depicting the sufferings of the boys. In September2000, the documentary was broadcast in GreatBritain, the United States, and other parts of the world.The U.S. State Department, in its Year 2001 HumanRights Report , estimated that about 15,000 children fromthe neighboring nations of Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali,and Togo had been sold into slavery to labor on IvoryCoast farms. The International Labor Organization reportedon June 11, 2001 that child slavery was indeed“widespread” in Ivory Coast and a Knight-Ridder newspaperinvestigation published on June 24, 2001 corroboratedthe use of slave boys on Ivory Coast cocoa farms.In 2006, The New York Times reported that child slaverycontinued to be a problem in West Africa. In 2007, BBCNews published several stories on the “thousands” of childrenwho were still working as slaves on cocoa farms inIvory Coast. Fortune Magazine in 2008 reported that slaveryin the Ivory Coast was still a continuing problem, anda BBC documentary entitled Chocolate: The Bitter Truth ,broadcast on March 24, 2010, a decade after the use ofslave boys in the chocolate industry was first revealed,showed young boys were still being used as slaves on thecocoa farms of the Ivory Coast.Although slavery is illegal in the Ivory Coast, thelaw is poorly enforced. Open borders, a shortage of enforcementofficers, and the willingness of local officials toaccept bribes from people trafficking in slaves, all contributeto the problem. In addition, prices for cocoa beans inglobal markets have been depressed most years since 1996.As prices declined, the already impoverished cocoa farmersturned to slavery to cut their labor costs. Although pricesbegan to improve during the early years of the twenty-firstcentury, cocoa prices fell again in 2004 and remained lowuntil the summer of 2010 when they again began to rise.The poverty that motivated many Ivory Coast cocoafarmers to buy children trafficked as slaves was aggravatedby other factors besides low cocoa prices. Working on isolatedfarms, cocoa farmers cannot communicate amongthemselves nor with the outside world to learn what cocoais selling for. Consequently they are at the mercy of localmiddlemen who drive out to the farms, buy the farmers’cocoa for half of its current market price, and haul it awayin their trucks. Unable to afford trucks themselves, thefarmers must rely on the middlemen to get their cocoa tomarket.Chocolate is a $13 billion industry in the UnitedStates which consumes 3.1 billion pounds each year. Thenames of the four largest U.S. chocolate manufacturers—all of whom use the morally “tainted” cocoa beans from theIvory Coast in their products—are well known: HersheyFoods Corp. (maker of Hershey’s milk chocolate, Reeses,and Almond Joy), M&M Mars, Inc. (maker of M&Ms,Mars, Twix, Dove, and Milky Ways), Nestlé USA, (makerof Nestlé Crunch, Kit Kat, Baby Ruth, and Butterfingers),and Kraft Foods (which also uses chocolate in its bakingand breakfast products). Less well known, but a key partof the industry, are the names of Archer Daniels MidlandCo., Barry Callebaut, and Cargill Inc., all of whom serve asmiddlemen who buy the beans from the Ivory Coast, grindand process them, and then sell the processed cocoa to thechocolate manufacturers.While all the major chocolate companies used beansfrom Ivory Coast farms, a portion of which relied onthe labor of enslaved children, many smaller companiesavoided using chocolate made from Ivory Coast beans andinstead turned to using chocolate processed from “untainted”beans grown in other parts of the world. Thesecompanies include: Clif Bar, Cloud Nine, Dagoba OrganicChocolate, Denman Island Chocolate, Gardners Candies,Green and Black’s, Kailua Candy Company, KoppersChocolate, L.A. Burdick Chocolates, Montezuma’s Chocolates,Newman’s Own Organics, Omanhene Cocoa BeanCompany, Rapunzel Pure Organics, and The EndangeredSpecies Chocolate Company. Other small companiesturned to using fair trade chocolate and organic chocolatebecause these are made from beans grown on farms thatare regularly monitored and so they, too, are made fromuntainted beans.That many farmers in the Ivory Coast use slave boysto farm their cocoa beans was already known to Americanchocolate-makers when media reports first began publicizingthe issue. In 2001, the Chocolate ManufacturersAssociation, a trade group of U.S. chocolate manufacturers(whose members include Hershey, Mars, Nestlé, andothers), admitted to newspapers that they had been awareof the use of slave boys on Ivory Coast cocoa farms forsome time. Pressured by various antislavery groups, theChocolate Manufacturers Association stated on June 22,2001 that it “condemned” “these practices” and agreed tofund a “study” of the situation.66 BASIC PRINCIPLESOn June 28, 2001, U.S. Representative Eliot Engelsponsored a bill aimed at setting up a labeling systemthat would inform consumers whether the chocolate theywere buying was “slavefree,” i.e., guaranteed not to havebeen produced by slave children. The measure passed theHouse of Representatives by a vote of 291 to115. Beforea measure can become law, however, both the House ofRepresentatives and the Senate must approve it. U.S.Senator Tom Harkin therefore prepared to introduce thesame bill in the Senate. Before the Senate could considerthe bill, the U.S. chocolate industry—led by Mars, Hershey,Kraft Foods and Archer Daniels Midland and withthe help of lobbyists Bob Dole and George Mitchell—mounted a major lobbying effort to fight the “slave-free”labeling system. The companies argued that a labeling systemwould not only hurt their own sales, but in the longrun could hurt poor African cocoa farmers by reducingtheir sales and lowering the price of cocoa which wouldadd to the very pressures that led them to use slave laborin the first place. As a result of the industry’s lobbying,the “slave-free” labeling bill was never approved by theSenate. Nevertheless, Representative Engel and SenatorHarkin threatened to introduce a new bill that would prohibitthe import of cocoa produced by slave labor, unlessthe chocolate companies voluntarily eliminated slave laborfrom their production chains.On October 1, 2001, the members of the ChocolateManufacturers Association and the World CocoaFoundation, caught in the spotlight of media attention,announced that they intended to put in place a systemthat would eliminate “the worse forms of child labor” includingslavery. In spring of 2002, the Chocolate ManufacturersAssociation and the World Cocoa Foundationas well as the major chocolate producers—Hershey’s,M&M Mars, Nestle, and World’s Finest Chocolate—andthe major cocoa processors—Blommer Chocolate, GuittardChocolate, Barry Callebaut, and Archer DanielsMidland—all signed an agreement to establish a systemof certification that would verify and certify that thecocoa beans they used were not produced by the use ofchild slaves. Known as the “Harkin-Engel Protocol,”the agreement also said the chocolate companies wouldfund training programs for cocoa bean farmers to educatethem about growing techniques while explaining the importanceof avoiding the use of slave labor. The membersof the Chocolate Manufacturers Association also agreedto “investigate” conditions on the cocoa farms and establishan “international foundation” that could “oversee andsustain efforts” to eliminate child slavery on cocoa farms.In July, 2002, the first survey sponsored by the ChocolateManufacturers Association concluded that some 200,000children—not all of them slaves—were working in hazardousconditions on cocoa farms and that most of themdid not attend school.Unfortunately, in 2002, Ivory Coast becameembroiled in a civil war that continued until an uneasypeace was established in 2005 and finalized in 2007; rebelforces, however, continued to control the northern halfof the country. Reports claimed that much of the moneyfunding the violence of both the government and rebelgroups during these years came from sales of cocoa, andthat buyers of “blood chocolate” from Ivory Coast weresupporting this violence.The 2005 deadline the major chocolate companiesand their associations had set, came, and passed without thepromised establishment of a certification system to ensurebeans were not being produced by slave children. At thispoint, the chocolate companies amended the protocol togive themselves more time by extending their own deadlineto July, 2008, saying that the certification process hadturned out to be more difficult than they thought it would,particularly with the outbreak of a civil war. Although thecompanies did not establish a certification system whilethe civil war raged, however, they did manage to secureenough cocoa beans to keep their chocolate factories goingat full speed throughout the war.By early 2008, the companies had still not startedwork on establishing a certification system or any othermethod of ensuring that slave labor was not used to producethe cocoa beans they used. The companies issued anew statement in which they extended to 2010 the deadlinefor complying with their promise to establish a certificationsystem. According to the companies, they hadbeen investing several million dollars a year into a foundationthat was working on the problem of child labor.However, an investigative reporter, in an article publishedin Fortune Magazine on February 15, 2008, found thefoundation had only one staff member working in IvoryCoast. The activities of the staff member were limitedto giving “sensitization” workshops to local people duringwhich he would explain that child labor is a bad thing.The foundation was also helping a shelter that providedhousing and education to homeless street children. Thereporter found no signs of work being done on a certificationsystem. By now the monitoring systems used inthe fair trade and organic parts of the industry had beenfunctioning for several years, yet the larger companies operatingin Ivory Coast seemed unable or uninterested inlearning from their example.The existence of a large and well-organized systemfor trafficking children from surrounding countries ontoIvory Coast farms was once against demonstrated on June18, 2009. On that date INTERPOL, the internationalpolice organization, carried out a series of raids of severalfarms believed to harbor slave children and managed torescue 54 children. Aged between 11 and 16, the childrenhad been working 12 hours a day for no salary; many wereregularly beaten and none had received any schooling. InETHICS AND BUSINESS 67a public statement, INTERPOL estimated that “ hundredsof thousands of children are working illegally in theplantations.”On September 30, 2010, the Payson Center atTulane University issued a report on the progress thathad been made on the certification system the chocolateindustry in 2002 had promised to establish, as wellas on the progress the industry had made regarding itspromise to eliminate “the worse forms of child labor,”including child slavery, on the farms from which the industrysourced its cocoa. The report was commissionedby the United States Department of Labor who had beenasked by Congress to assess progress on the “Harkin-Engel Protocol,” and who gave Tulane University aninitial grant of $4.3 million in 2006, and an additional$1.2 million in 2009 to compile the report. According tothe report, “Industry is still far from achieving its targetto have a sector-wide independently verified certificationprocess fully in place . . . by the end of 2010.” Thereport found that between 2002—the date of the originalagreement—and September 2010, the Industry hadmanaged to contact only about 95 (2.3 percent) of IvoryCoast’s cocoa farming communities, and that to completeits “remediation efforts” it would have to contact an additional3,655 farm communities. While the Tulane group“confirmed” that forced labor was being used on the cocoafarms, it also found that no industry efforts to “remediate”the use of forced labor “are in place.”Not surprisingly, the problem of certification stillremained unresolved in 2011. After the media attentionhad died down, the manufacturers and distributors buyingIvory Coast cocoa beans seemed incapable of findinga way to “certify” that slavery was not used to harvestthe beans they purchased. Representatives of the chocolatecompanies argued that the problem of certificationwas difficult because there are more than 600,000 cocoafarms in Ivory Coast; most of them small family farmslocated in remote rural regions that are difficult to reachand that lack good roads and other infrastructure. Critics,however, pointed out that these difficulties did not seemto pose any obstacles to obtaining beans from these manyscattered cocoa farms. Cocoa bean farmers, poor and buffetedby the low price of cocoa beans, continued to use enslavedchildren although they were secretive about it. Tomake matters worse, on February 2011, fighting betweenthe rebels in the north and the Ivory Coast governmentin the south again broke out for a brief period in a disputeover who was the legitimate winner of the 2010 presidentialelection. The fighting ended in April 2011 when oneof the candidates finally conceded the election, allowingAllassane Ouattara to be declared the legitimate president.In 2010 another film, this one entitled The DarkSide of Chocolate, once more documented the continuinguse of enslaved children on Ivory Coast farms, althoughrepresentatives of the chocolate companies interviewedin the film denied the problem or claimed they did notknow anything about it. The beans tainted by the laborof slave boys are therefore still being quietly mixed togetherin bins and warehouses with beans harvested byfree paid workers, so that the two are indistinguishable.From there they still make their way into the nowtainted chocolate candies that Hershey’s, M&M Mars,Nestle and Kraft Foods make and that we buy here andin Europe. Without an effective system of certification, infact, virtually all the chocolate we eat that is made fromWest African (Ivory Coast and Ghana) cocoa contains aportion of tainted chocolate made from beans harvestedby enslaved children.Questions1. What are the systemic, corporate, and individualethical issues raised by this case?2. In your view, is the kind of child slavery discussed inthis case absolutely wrong no matter what, or is it onlyrelatively wrong, i.e., if one happens to live in a society(like ours) that disapproves of child slavery? Explainyour view and why you hold it.3. Who shares in the moral responsibility for the slaveryoccurring in the chocolate industry?4. Consider the bill that Representive Engle and SenatorHarkin attempted to enact into a law, but whichnever became a law because of the lobbying effortsof the chocolate companies. What does this incidentshow about the view that “to be ethical it is enough forbusinesspeople to follow the law”?