While the original promise called for the eradication of child labor in West African cocoa fields and set a deadline for 2005, next yearвЂ™s goal calls only for its reduction by 70 percent. Since then, however, the chocolate industry also has scaled back its ambitions. But they bring them here to work, and itвЂ™s the boss who takes the money.вЂќ And they would have to develop a certification system to assure consumers that a bag of M&MвЂ™s or a ReeseвЂ™s Peanut Butter Cup did not originate with the swinging of a machete by a boy like Abou. To succeed, the companies would have to overcome the powerful economic forces that draw children into hard labor in one of the worldвЂ™s poorest places. It was a project companies agreed to complete in four years.

Congress, chiefs of some of the biggest chocolate companies signed a pledge to eradicate вЂњthe worst forms of child laborвЂќ from their West African cocoa suppliers. Industry promises began in 2001 when, under pressure from the U.S.

But in few industries, experts say, is the evidence of objectionable practices so clear, the industryвЂ™s pledges to reform so ambitious and the breaching of those promises so obvious. With the growth of the global economy, Americans have become accustomed to reports of worker and environmental exploitation in faraway places. Men unload bags of cocoa near the office of Cargill, one of the leading cocoa suppliers for the chocolate industry. Mars, maker of M&MвЂ™s and Milky Way, can trace only 24 percent of its cocoa back to farms Hershey, the maker of Kisses and ReeseвЂ™s, less than half NestlГ© can trace 49 percent of its global cocoa supply to farms. One reason is that nearly 20 years after pledging to eradicate child labor, chocolate companies still cannot identify the farms where all their cocoa comes from, let alone whether child labor was used in producing it. вЂњIвЂ™m not going to make those claims,вЂќ an executive at one of the large chocolate companies said. When asked this spring, representatives of some of the biggest and best-known brands - Hershey, Mars and NestlГ© - could not guarantee that any of their chocolates were produced without child labor. Labor Department report, more than 2 million children were engaged in dangerous labor in cocoa-growing regions. Next year, they face another target date and, industry officials indicate, they probably will miss that, too.ДЄs a result, the odds are substantial that a chocolate bar bought in the United States is the product of child labor.ДЄbout two-thirds of the worldвЂ™s cocoa supply comes from West Africa where, according to a 2015 U.S. The worldвЂ™s chocolate companies have missed deadlines to uproot child labor from their cocoa supply chains in 2005, 20. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post) 'Too little, too late' A steady stream of buses from Burkina Faso carry passengers and trafficked children as young as 12 to work in cocoa fields in Ivory Coast.

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