Nestle & Cocoa

Nestle USA is a part of Nestle SA in Vevey, Switzerland -- the world's largest food company and also the subject of one of the world's longest running boycotts. For over twenty years Nestle has faced continued pressure from consumers to end its agressive and irresonsible promotion of infant formula - a policy that has cost the lives of over 1.5 million infants around the world. But Nestle's irresponsible attitude towards children doesn't end there. As a leading exporter of cocoa from the Ivory Coast, Nestle has also been implicated in the ongoing abuse and torture of child cocoa laborers.

With an annual sales of over $65 billion, Nestle SA is not only one of the world's largest manufacturers of chocolate products but also the third largest exporter of cocoa from regions affected by forced and abusive child labor. Through its subsidiary Nestle Cote d'Ivoire, Nestle maintains distribution, administrative and sales offices throughout the Ivory Coast, even as it claims to have little idea where its cocoa comes from or what the conditions are like on the farms with which it regularly does business.

As both a leading exporter of cocoa from the Ivory Coast and manufacturer of chocolate products for consumption around the world, Nestle owes a special responsibility to consumers to ensure that its cocoa is no longer produced using forced and abusive child labor. But rather than embrace Fair Trade as a comprehensive and proven solution to child labor abuse, Nestle continues to hide behind its failed and floundering industry protocol and refuses to source any portion of its cocoa from the only farms that can be proven not to have employed abusive child labor -- those that are Fair Trade Certified.

International Labor Rights Forum has also filed a lawsuit in 2005 against Nestle, Cargil and ADM on behalf of Malian children who were trafficked from Mali into the Ivory Coast and forced to work twelve to fourteen hours a day with no pay, little food and sleep, and frequent beatings.