Analysis: The Dark Side Of Chocolate

Did you know that there is a secret ingredient in chocolate that you were not aware of? Chocolate is one of the most popular commodities in the word, little do we know that most cocoa beans are harvested in Côte d’Ivoire using child labor. Most children are tricked into this process and are smuggled to their “owners”. The common belief about slavery being abolished now seems untrue; it merely changed its form. The documentary “The Dark Side of Chocolate” (Miki Mistrati, 2010) sheds light upon major issues facing the chocolate industry. The main issues addressed are child labor, child trafficking, and corporate social responsibility with major companies such as Nestle taking part in these horrific acts against these children.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the firm’s responsibility towards the society it lives in where the firm tries to integrate social and environmental concerns within their operations. It is suggested that consumers should punish firms who are insincere in their social involvement (Becker-Olsen, 2006). As seen in the documentary, Nestle was not fully integrating CSR within its operations where it was shown to have business transactions with farms that promote child labor. Yet it is a very profitable company. This may be from the lack of consumer awareness about the issue. In a study, opposite conclusions were drawn where it shows that consumers don’t regularly use CSR as a purchasing criterion, which may falsify the whole idea behind CSR (Mohr,