Cocoa bean

first discovered of cocoa was as early as the 900 AD. The cacao grew on trees in the wild. The people to use chocolate were the “Olmec.” Now today it is called southeast Mexico. The time frame that they lived in was in the 1000’s BC. A thousand years later (250-900 AD) the Maya did use chocolate. But, the clearest history of chocolate begins with the Maya. The power of the Mayan was minimizing by the 1400 AD so the Aztecs started to take over. The Aztecs could not grow their own cocoa so they…

Cocoa Child Labor in Ghana In Ghana, African-American children, ages five to seventeen, are in poverty because cocoa is a cash crop so human traffickers need slaves to harvest and plant it. As a result, the human traffickers easily manipulate the children of Ghana to work for them is because they are in severe poverty and they start working at a young age to try to support their family. On the other hand, other children are ¨sold¨ to the human traffickers by their own relatives because they…

A plump kid in America bites into a chocolate. A scarred, fatigued child in the Ivory Coast hacks his way through the bean pods on the cocoa tree using a machete. The boy in America grumbles his way through school and wonders when he can go home to play video games. The boy in Africa throws a sack of bean pods over his shoulder that is much too heavy for him. At the end of the day the privileged kid will climb into his bed with no worries. The child slave will climb into bed, exhausted, with no…

Columbus set foot in the new world. During the Mayan and Aztec Empire, cacao beans weren 't used as food but as currency and a bitter drink. Around 1519, an unknown Spaniard mixed sugar and cacao together creating the sweet chocolate flavor we know. The process of making chocolate first starts of with sìfting the cacao from foreign objects. It is then weighted and sorted by type. For half an hour or two, the beans are roasted at temperatures ranging from 210º - 290º F. The…

“Child slavery is a crime against humanity. Humanity itself is at stake here. A lot of work still remains, but I will see the end of child labor in my lifetime,” said Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian activist and founder of the Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation. For many centuries, different forms of child labors existed all over the world. Although for the past decades or so, child labor has been prohibited in countries, and others have increased. Even in America, we may not have child labor,…

their will in many different industries. (The Polaris Project) The majority of cocoa used for the production of chocolate is made on…

labor and land Originally, cocoa was mainly cultivated in the tropical rainforests in South America. Once established in Ghana, cocoa production expanded rapidly in Africa and by the mid 1920s, WCA has become the main producer. Cocoa grows naturally in tropical rain forests. This habitat provides heavy shade and rainfall, uniform temperature and constant relative humidity and is typically only found within 10º of the equator. There are basically three group types of cocoa grown: Criollo,…

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…

cultures to discover and domesticate cocoa pods in 1900 BCE. Chocolate was very prominent in their societies and it was present in their marital celebrations and, even funeral rituals. Cocoa beans were so valuable back in this era. It was a form of currency which was mainly used by the Aztecs for exchanging food, clothing, taxes, and even offerings to their gods. The Mayans and Aztecs both had gods they gave offerings, thanks, and stories on how the great cocoa pods were given to them. Mayans…

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…