The Future of the Cocoa Industry

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According to wetherill, it would cost about a hundred and 25 million dollars per year to implement across most cocoa farms. It currently costs about 75 dollars per farmer per year am to run this system a. We've successfully brought that cost down from about 90 dollars when we started. And so that means, on an annual basis, to cover all farmers, for instance, you're looking at a hundred and 20 million dollars peryear. A that's quite a price tack. But when the programme is successfully implemented, it does change lives. Here she is, in the words of a translator in ihabat: She ware to happy, and she was grateful.

Child labor has been a longstanding scourge in the $100-billion cocoa industry for more than two decades. Despite efforts by U.S. Congressmen, African governments, the world’s biggest chocolate companies and various non-profit groups, it has been a tough nut to crack. In this episode, we look at program that actually seems to be having an effect. It uses a network of smartphones to identify child laborers on thousands of remote farms in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. It then tries to persuade farmers to stop using their children on farms and to send them to school instead. You will hear from cocoa farmers in Ghana, from Nestle, maker of KitKat, and a Swiss non-profit group called the International Cocoa Initiative, or ICI, which co-founded the program. (Photo: AP)