Slaves to Chocolate?

The

Amsterdam offices of TV producers Teun van de Keuken and Maurice Dekkers are pretty much what you'd expect: an editing room, a storage room, and a room with a scenic fake backdrop for filming interviews. The only clue that this isn't movie business as usual is the boxes and boxes of T-shirts and bright red-wrapped chocolate bars scattered on almost every surface.

"I never thought I'd be a candy man," says Van de Keuken with a laugh. "But that's what the job asks from me for now." Teun — or Tony — is certainly an unlikely chocolatier. A journalist and filmmaker, he produces a popular Michael Moore-style consumer advocacy TV program. But after learning that in Cote d'Ivoire, which produces some 40% of the world's cocoa, tens of thousands of children are forced to work on plantations, many of them in virtual slavery, the chocolate lover became a chocolate maker.

"It's so strange that we in our rich Western society eat our chocolate without thinking about it," says Van de Keuken. "We just want to pay the lowest possible price, and in another part of the world, these people are forced to work in the most horrific circumstances."

The filmmaker's first act of protest was personal. One day he ate 19 chocolate bars and then turned himself into police for knowingly buying a product made with slave labor, something he says is criminal under Dutch law. "At first, I just called the police and said I did a terrible thing. They said, 'Don't worry, we all eat chocolate, good-bye.' Then I hired a lawyer."

His attempt to prosecute himself was dismissed by the court, but Van de Keuken launched an appeal. In the meantime, he took his TV show to Burkina Faso to find some of the children forced to work on the cocoa plantations — kids, he says, who had never tasted chocolate until he gave them some. (They liked it.) Van de Keuken says recruiters from the Ivory Coast cross the border into the destitute country and lure children over with promises of money or even bicycles. Once they get there, he says, "they're forced to work, not paid, and not allowed to leave — the U.N. definition of slavery."

Frustrated by the progress of efforts such as the 2001 Harkin-Engel protocol (named after the U.S. lawmakers who promoted it) to ensure that chocolate consumed in the West was made from slavery-free cocoa, Van de Keuken began producing his own.

His chocolate bars, made from cocoa produced by a 45,000 member collective in Ghana, are called Tony's Chocolonely, and Van de Keuken says they were the first on the market to be packaged as slavery-free. Van de Keuken says the bars were an overnight success. "That shows that people really want this and that they're aware of how things are made," he says. "You have to just tell them and show them what reality is."

As for the chocolatier's criminal case against himself, last month an appeals judge agreed with the lower court that prosecutors don't have to charge Van de Keuken if they don't want to. But in an unusual move, the judge found there are "justifiable grounds" to believe that serious crimes are being committed in the Ivory Coast, something that Van de Keuken says pleasantly surprised him.

"He also said that not only you, Teun van de Keuken, but other consumers in Holland and the rest of the world are responsible for these atrocities," he says.

It's still a disappointing end to the case for Van de Keuken, who is considering having a child slave bring a civil suit against him in the future.

For now, he's hard at work on his feature film Tony and the Chocolate Factory, which he hopes to release by year's end. And, of course, there's the chocolate business. Van de Keuken is under no illusion that his treats have stopped child slavery. In fact, recognizing that even he can't guarantee 100% slavery-free chocolate at this point, he's changed his packaging. His bars now promise they're "On the way to becoming 100 percent slavery-free."