Worst form of child labour in chocolate industry

The chocolate industry is worth an estimated $110 billion a year, and yet its key commodity is grown by some of the poorest people on the planet, in plantations that can hide the worst forms of child labour. Accurate figures are impossible to come by, but up to 800,000 children are thought to work in the cocoa sector across the Ivory Coast; children who are both a symptom of and a self-perpetuating factor in a much wider problem -- poverty. In 1980 the international cocoa price was $3,750 a tonne -- equivalent to $10,000 a tonne in 2013. Nowadays it is considered high at roughly $2,800 a tonne. Over the same period, the value of cocoa within a chocolate bar has halved from 12 per cent to just 6 per cent, so although a farmer's cocoa is essential to a chocolate bar, its value is a small part of the ultimate cost of production. Most (70 per cent) of a modern day chocolate bar's value goes to the manufacturer because the majority of the costs are in marketing, research and development, according to CNN.