[bmacho]

This not.

> - Also, if cocoa farming becomes more profitable, it might encourage _more_ child labor as parents pull their kids from school to work "on the family farm".

Wtf. No? Do you pull your kids from school so they can help you at work?

[all2]

> Wtf. No? Do you pull your kids from school so they can help you at work?

If I were in a position of "family eats or family doesn't eat" I would be sorely tempted to tap my kids as extra income earners. This isn't a particularly new problem in the world. The West has only gotten stringent on child labor in the last century, and you're seeing other countries coming up that are also struggling with the issue at hand: enough money to feed the family.

We're rather privileged in the West in that we don't really struggle for necessities. Even our impoverished have clothing, shelter, and food. We don't really understand what it means to be truly impoverished. Nor do we understand the kinds of decisions a father or mother must make in order to ensure their survival and the survival of their children.

[autoexec]

Many of the child slaves in Ghana are trafficked. They're not working on the family farm to help grow food for their next family dinner, they're being forced into slavery and made to work for farms that sell their product to billion dollar multinational corporations.

The solution to ending slavery is to make laws which ban the practice and then strictly enforcing those laws. Once that's done it won't matter how profitable farming is because anyone who uses child slaves will suffer instead of profiting. Exceptions can be made for people farming their own food for their own tables which would still prevent the trafficking of children just so that Mars Incorporated and The Hershey Company can stuff their pockets with more money.