Nowadays, in cacao-growing places like Nigeria and the Ivory Coast, he tells us, low "cacao prices and deregulation of the market have made farmers unwilling or unable to pay their workforce, and some of them have resorted to coercing children into slavery.... The director of Mali's Save the Children Fund ... said: 'People who are drinking cocoa or coffee are drinking their blood. It is the blood of young children carrying six kilos of cacao sacks, so heavy that they have wounds all over their shoulders.' "
Still, as Richardson details, many of the best-known manufacturers of chocolates -- Suchard of Switzerland, the Quaker-founded British firms of Fry, Rowntree and Cadbury -- have a venerable history of humanitarian concern for their labor force (Cadbury even established a utopian village, far from the urban pollution, for them to inhabit). Milton Hershey of Pennsylvania took a paternalistic interest in his workers, and the Mars company is known for its relatively egalitarian organizational style.
