Actor Idris Elba is now shining his spotlight on the problems of slavery and child labour within the chocolate industry by appearing in Tony’s Chocolonely’s first ever ad.
The 60 second video is part of the company’s mission to make all chocolate 100% slave free and comes as Tony’s Chocolonely announce it’s arrival into additional Irish stores this month.
Irish people are the third-largest chocolate consumers in the world so the impact of choosing to purchase responsibly sourced chocolate is significant. 60% of the chocolate we consume originates in West Africa — Ghana and the Ivory Coast and only 6 to 7% of all cocoa worldwide is sold under Fair Trade terms.
“Being an Englishman who is the son of a Ghanaian mother and a Sierra Leonian father, I am all too aware of the shocking inequalities between the West and Africa,” said Idris Elba, who is himself active as an ambassador for the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development. “It’s an honour for me to voice Tony’s powerful manifesto against exploitation and I see this collaboration as a first step to doing more impactful work together.”
Tony’s Chocolonely was founded in 2005 by three journalists from the Dutch TV show ‘Keuringsdienst van Waarde’ after they discovered that the world’s largest chocolate manufacturers were buying cocoa from plantations that used illegal child labour and modern slavery.
The video begins with Elba asking: “What’s not to love about chocolate? Well two million children working illegally on cocoa plantations. That’s unfair.”
Elba concludes the video saying: “Chocolate can be a powerful force of change. Make illegal child labour and modern day slavery a shame of the past.”
To be part of the solution everyone is invited to sign Tony’s petition here: https://tonyschocolonely.com/
