Claiming the industry has failed to provide consumers with "a reasonable assurance" as to the origins of their chocolate, ILRF has articulated a clutch of basic principles that reflect current demand from consumers.

"Consumers should reward companies with ethical integrity in their supply chains and continue to demand that worlds largest chocolate companies answer the question of how consumers can be assured their chocolate is not produced using exploited child labour," says Tim Newman from ILRF's campaigns department.

The issue of child labour came to the fore in 2001 after a series of media exposes depicted forced child labour and trafficking on West African cocoa farms.

The reports served as a catalyst for calls to purge this issue from the cocoa supply chain, leading to the signing of the Harkin-Engel Protocol in 2001 by leading stakeholders, including cocoa processors and chocolate makers.

Welcomed at the time by human rights groups and labour watchdogs, the protocol set out to eliminate the worst forms of child labor from cocoa supply chains. Together producing over 70 per cent of the world's cocoa supply, Ghana and Ivory Coast were to feel the major thrust of the protocol.

But in a new report, the ILRF claims the "original intent of the protocol has not been achieved" with industry dragging its feet.

"Consumers today have no more assurance than they did eight years ago that trafficked or exploited child labour was not used in the production of their chocolate," states the report.

In contrast, US democratic Senator Tom Harkin, the motor behind the protocol in 2001, said recently after a trip to West Africa that a number of important achievements had occurred since 2001... (Lindsey Partos)