So what is the truth about the production of chocolate? To start off, seventy-five percent of the world's cocoa comes from Africa mainly on the western region of the Ivory Coast and Ghana. While working on cocoa bean plantation serves as a job for working citizens of the African community, it is also an area in which slave traffickers force and trick children and their parents into the industry. In most cases, children are unsuccessful in being freed from captivity; girls are often sold into prostitution while boys continue to continue labor work on other plantations.

Child slaves aren't the only ones in the cooca bean industry that get treated unfairly. Those working for money on cocoa bean plantations do not recieve a fair amount of money to hold sustainable lives. It is because of these two factors that the U.S. government--along with several other groups nation-wide--is trying to implement regulations to make sure workers are being treated and paid fairly. Laws such as the Fair Trade regulation is one rule that many leaders have agreed to using. It certifies that all labor workers get paid a fair amount of money based on the time they've worked or how much they've produced. Like the minimum wage regulation in America, the Fair Trade law ensures the fairness of paid workers.

To examine the awarenes of the truth on the chocolate industry in college/teenage communities, I created a survey questioning students all around the United States to see how much people knew where one of their favorite foods originated as well as the people who produced it. The results I got from my friends was shocking. Click here to see the results.