The Labor Department Acts Against Child Labor in Cocoa; What's Hershey Doing?

Unless you're seeking out fairly-traded chocolate, chances are if you're eating the stuff that it comes from farms where workers are treated poorly, paid sub-poverty wages (if at all), working in unsafe conditions, and are often less than 14 years old.

Efforts have been underway to improve those conditions, and particularly to get children off farms and into schools, for years, including from Washington in 2001 when the Harkin-Engel Protocol was signed.

Progress has been slow, however, and the protocol has been criticized for being ineffective. To reignite the effort a little bit, the government has just committed more funding to end child labor in two of the world's largest cocoa-producing nations, Ghana and Ivory Coast.

The pledge, $10 million from the Labor Department and $7 million from the chocolate industry, will go to building schools and helping rural families in the two countries out of poverty, so that they are not forced to rely on children's wages—a key contributing reason kids end up on the farms in the first place.

The goal is to reduce forced child labor on cocoa farms by 70 percent by 2020.