The popular Swiss corporation, Nestle, is under international scrutiny for its role in child labour and slave trafficking in West African cocoa plantations. Many of the workers shipped to the West African coca producers are children who work under appalling conditions. Some stories report children as young as 8 years old working 12 to 14 hour days, who are frequently beaten and supplied with meals that consist of nothing other than corn paste. At night the children are locked up to prevent escape, consequently, sexual assault is a common occurrence at the plantations.
Meanwhile Nestle is generating 11.8 billion Canadian dollars in net profit and is fully aware of the child slaves they employ. Chairman and CEO of Nestle, Bradley Alford signed an agreement in 2002, called the International Cocoa Initiative, which is dedicated to reduce child trafficking and abusive labour practices in West Africa, however there is very little evidence that child labour practices under Nestle plantations have discontinued. To date 109,000 children work on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast alone, many of those farms are owned by Nestle. Nestle is putting their multibillion dollar corporation ahead of the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent African children which are victimized by Nestle and its lack of ethics or respect.
A recent documentary following the trafficking of child slaves into the Ivory Coast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y882AajKo1s
Check out these articles:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1311982.stm