The Importance Of Think Before You Eat Chocolate

Think Before You Eat Chocolate
“At 6 a.m., 10-year-old Emmanuel wakes and readies himself for a day of labor in the cocoa fields. Along the way, he watches as other kids walk in the opposite direction - toward school. He reaches the fields at sunrise and uses his machete to slice ripe cocoa pods from the tree. Later, he carries the cocoa pods he’s harvested from the field, hacks them open and gathers the beans, which will later be used to make chocolate.” Kids in Ghana have to wake up every day very early in the morning to go to work in the cocoa fields. In the cocoa fields they have to use sharp tools like machetes and knives. There ages very from five years old to seventeen years old. They have to work for ten hours a day. At that age and …show more content…
There families are poor so the kids have to work because the parents send them off. As a result, the kids go and use very dangerous tools while working.They are forced to work with knives and machetes. In the process most times their arms, shoulders, hands, legs, and other parts of their bodies. With the machetes they have to cut down the branches of the cocoa tree. Then with the knives or machetes they have to cut open the cocoa and collect all of the cocoa beans out of it. They have been cutting these and using sharp weapons and tools since the late 1800s to 2018. Even after the kids get scraped and cut they only get two dollars a day. Minimum wage here is seven dollars and twenty nine cents an hour and they only get two dollars a day. Even after they get scraped they have to put them in a bag and carry the one-hundred pound bag across the …show more content…
But, the pesticide is very dangerous. The kids in Ghana don’t wear the protective clothing that they are supposed to. Pesticide has very dangerous chemicals inside like ammonia, arsenic, benzene, chlorine, dioxins,ethylene oxide,and methanol. These are not the only chemicals in the spray, there are lots more and more dangerous too. These chemicals can make you very very sick. They can cause cancer or even worse, you can die from the chemicals inside of the pesticide. The kids are forced to spray all of the cocoa plants without the protective clothing. When the kids spray the pesticide they do it without a mask or clothing which can cause you to inhale it. Without the protective clothing it can get exposed on to there skin and they can get bad rashes and chemicals in their skin. The pesticide can also spill or splash onto their