Avoid Hershey's on Halloween (and every other day)

This Halloween, I'm sure many trick-or-treaters will find their bags filled with lots of Hershey's chocolate. But please don't be one of the people who give that junk away.

I stopped buying and eating Hershey's chocolate last year, when I learned (and reported) that they were closing a candy factory in Reading, Pennsylvania, and moving 260 jobs to Mexico instead.

Now, in a Care2 human rights blog post, Beth Buczynski gives us three more good reasons to boycott Hershey's:

Sourcing

Much of Hershey's cocoa is sourced from West Africa, a region plagued by sourced labor, human trafficking, and abusive child labor. Hershey does not have a system in place to ensure that its cocoa purchased from this region is not tainted by labor rights abuses.

Priorities

While Hershey's CEO received an $8 million compensation package in 2009, many of the farmers who grow cocoa in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana that ends up in Hershey products are barely able to cover their costs, and as a result, use unpaid child labor and even forced labor on their farms.

Greenwashing

Hershey points to various charitable donations to children in the US and programs in West Africa as examples of its social responsibility, yet has no policies in place to ensure that the cocoa used in its products is not produced with forced, trafficked, or child labor.

These points were derived from a recent report by Global Exchange, in conjunction with Green America, the International Labor Rights Forum, and Oasis USA. And they are just the tip of the iceberg.

Learn more:

>> Read the full report (PDF): Time to Raise the Bar