Icelandic chocolate is made from cacao beans the could have been picked by slave labour, a Social Democrat candidate for city council points out.
“Did you know that Icelandic chocolate is made from cacao beans which have not been certified?,” asks Kristín Soffía Jónsdóttir on her blog. “Did you know that this means that slaves possibly picked these beans to make the chocolate that Bónus offers at a low price?”
Kristín says that she is not the first person to point out that the ever-popular Icelandic Easter eggs are likely made from slave-made chocolate. “Chocolate producers in Iceland got in the news out of these unjust eggs. One producer said it would be too expensive to use only certified chocolate,” she writes.
In fact, it was confirmed last year that the chocolate in Icelandic Easter eggs is the product of child slave labour.
DV reports that the Icelandic branch of the organisation Stop The Traffic – which fights against child labour and slavery – reached out to Icelandic chocolate producers last year, but only received a response from Nói Síríus. This company, it was confirmed, bought their chocolate from a Swiss company that obtained their chocolate from child slave labour camps in the Ivory Coast. Nói Síríus, in turn, responded that they had no control over this, and were in fact suspicious of certified chocolate.
Kristín advises people to not buy Icelandic Easter eggs, and has herself decided to make her own egg using Fair Trade chocolate.
“Happy Easter all the same – hope I’m not ruining anything for anyone,” she writes. “Don’t we all know this anyway?”
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