PRESS RELEASES

School children demonstrate outside Nestle Headquarters against slave trade chocolate

Wednesday 28th February, 9am Nestle Headquarters, St. Georges House, Park Lane, Croydon, Surrey CR9 1NR

Pupils from London schools and youth clubs will be protesting outside Nestle Headquarters to stop the sale of slave trade chocolate. The children decided to try to do something to stop the forced labour of African children on cocoa plantations which provides the raw material for a third of all UK Easter Eggs.
 
They hope to put pressure on chocolate manufacturers to enforce a "Traffik Free Guarantee" on all chocolate products which has been devised by anti-trafficking campaign STOP THE TRAFFIK.
 
We will be reading testimonies from trafficked children wearing For Sale and £20 signs round their necks.  This was the price one boy was sold for by traffickers to work on a plantation.
 
One testimony is of a young Malian boy called Victor who was forced to
work on a cocoa farm on the Ivory Coast for three years, suffering harsh treatment and beatings before he managed to escape. He said: "Tell your children that they have bought something that I suffered to make. When they are eating chocolate they are eating my flesh."
 
Boys as young of 12 and perhaps even younger are taken from homes in Mali by deception or force by people traffickers and then sold to Ivory Coast plantations where they are made to work 12 hours a day and seven days a week, in appalling conditions.
 
Nearly half the world's cocoa is harvested in the Ivory Coast.  This is a hidden trade; exact figures are hard to come by. In 2000 the US State Department Human Rights Report found that over 15,000 Malian children were trafficked into this area to work as slaves both on coffee and cocoa plantations, the majority is universally agreed would be on cocoa.
 
STT chairman Rev Steve Chake, who will also be present at the rally, said: 'Inevitably the strict enforcement of the "Traffik Free Guarantee" will eat into chocolate manufacturers profits but last year Nestle profits rose by 14% to £3.78 Billion, so we think that they can afford to put their house in order."
 
For more information call Ruth Dearnley at STOP THE TRAFFIK 020 7261 4650, 07795 606 708 or email ruth.dearnley@stopthetraffik.org

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