Essay about Bittersweet Unwrapping the Hidden Side of...

People have always had a sweet tooth. In the mid 17th century, the sugar cane was introduced to the New World by the Dutch, who, using slaves, seized this opportunity to make a profit in the British West Indies. Sugar, as well as slaves, played a vital role in the Atlantic Triangular Trade among the Americas, Europe and Africa. Slaves were the working force in this trade network because they harvested the cash crops that circulated around the Atlantic Ocean. A form of slavery very similar to those in the sugar plantations of the Caribbeans is child labor in the modern cocoa industry. Cocoa trees only thrive in humid regions near the equator, which is why two West African countries, Cà ´te d’Ivoire and Ghana, supply well over half of the†¦show more content†¦At the end, the boys have both emotional and physical scars that remain much like those described by Frederick Douglass in his autobiography The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Douglass). Most are afr aid to escape, but those who do, such as 12 year old Aly Diabate, alerted Ivorian authorities to the situation, who have since put in effort to boost awareness of anti-slavery laws (Raghavan). Cote d’Ivoire, a third of whose economy is based on cocoa exports, has long been a country reliant on exports of coffee, cocoa, and cotton. The same still holds true today; farmers are dependent on cocoa to support their lives, but there is one serious downside: cocoa is one of the most unstable crops, and because of its fluctuating price, farmers are constantly on the lookout for cheap labor, which leads them to enslave children (Chanthavong 4). The remote locations of the cocoa plantations contribute to the secretiveness of child slavery. The trading process leaves behind very little evidence, and the conditions of modern slaves are the exact same of that of their ancestors: â€Å"they aren’t paid, they are kept working by violence or the threat of it, and they are not free to leave† (Robbins). The cost to purchase a slave before the Civil War was $50,000 (in today’s dollars); whereas now, slaves are being sold as cheap as $50. The ownership of one human being by another is illegal in the world, but in Cote d’Ivoire, it is not called slaveowning but