What do you think of when you hear the term child labor? Chocolate, money issues, and children who get no education, right? Wrong. You probably thought of crying children who can’t see their families for years at a time. Well it may be hard to believe, but those kids are the backbone of the chocolate industry. 10-year-old Emmanuel wakes up at 6am and gets ready to work in the cocoa fields. As he is walking, he sees other kids walking the other way, towards school. At sunrise, he reaches the fields and uses his machete to slice cocoa pods from the tree. Then he carries the cocoa pods he’d harvested from the field, hacks them open and collects the beans, which would be used to make chocolate later. Some may argue that children learn very quickly
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Almost everybody who is involved in child labor cannot balance an education also. The children also have to try and make sure that they don’t cut themselves with the chainsaws and machetes that they have to work with. “Only 63.5% of children in Côte d’Ivoire attend school. From ages 7-14, 21.5% of children combine school and work,” the United States Department of Labor proved. Since only 63.5% of the children in Côte d’Ivoire attend school in general, the percentage is most likely decreasing because of the rates of child labor increasing. Child labor doesn’t benefit anyone besides the farmers and the people enjoying it thousands of miles away. The people who don’t actually have to work or worry about how hard it is to do. The United Nations found out that, “Today, throughout the world, around 215 million children work, many full-time. They do not go to school and have little or no time to play. Many do not receive proper nutrition or care. They are denied the chance to be children. More than half of them are exposed to the worst forms of child labour.” The family members who decide to sell the kids didn’t know that the children wouldn’t get an education and aren’t properly treated by the owners of the farm. They can’t even play or interact with the other people who were also either sold to the farmers or get paid by the farmers. Also the families can almost not even see the children for long periods of …show more content…
Child labor in the cocoa industry must be stopped by the Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire governments because the working conditions are unhealthy for children, children can’t support their families with the limited amount of money they earn, and child labor endangers mental and social development. There are many different kinds of child labor but in the cocoa industry, there are few who live without hurting themselves at all. For some families, child labor is a key component for the survival of their family business. There aren’t enough adults to work on the fields so they need their children to work also. But families usually don’t want harm to be brought to anyone else in their family, and on cocoa farms the children have to work long hours and risk possibly chopping their heads off. And all just for the enjoyment of unknown children on the other side of the
Almost everybody who is involved in child labor cannot balance an education also. The children also have to try and make sure that they don’t cut themselves with the chainsaws and machetes that they have to work with. “Only 63.5% of children in Côte d’Ivoire attend school. From ages 7-14, 21.5% of children combine school and work,” the United States Department of Labor proved. Since only 63.5% of the children in Côte d’Ivoire attend school in general, the percentage is most likely decreasing because of the rates of child labor increasing. Child labor doesn’t benefit anyone besides the farmers and the people enjoying it thousands of miles away. The people who don’t actually have to work or worry about how hard it is to do. The United Nations found out that, “Today, throughout the world, around 215 million children work, many full-time. They do not go to school and have little or no time to play. Many do not receive proper nutrition or care. They are denied the chance to be children. More than half of them are exposed to the worst forms of child labour.” The family members who decide to sell the kids didn’t know that the children wouldn’t get an education and aren’t properly treated by the owners of the farm. They can’t even play or interact with the other people who were also either sold to the farmers or get paid by the farmers. Also the families can almost not even see the children for long periods of …show more content…
Child labor in the cocoa industry must be stopped by the Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire governments because the working conditions are unhealthy for children, children can’t support their families with the limited amount of money they earn, and child labor endangers mental and social development. There are many different kinds of child labor but in the cocoa industry, there are few who live without hurting themselves at all. For some families, child labor is a key component for the survival of their family business. There aren’t enough adults to work on the fields so they need their children to work also. But families usually don’t want harm to be brought to anyone else in their family, and on cocoa farms the children have to work long hours and risk possibly chopping their heads off. And all just for the enjoyment of unknown children on the other side of the