Shocking Report Links Girl Scout Cookies to Child Sex Trafficking and Slave Labor
Shocking Report Links Girl Scout Cookies to Child Sex Trafficking and Slave Labor
Free Thought Project
By Francesco Abbruzzino
A shocking investigation by the Associated Press into child labor has revealed unsettling details about an ingredient in Girl Scout cookies and it its ties to child slave labor and sex trafficking. Palm oil. The $65 billion global palm oil industry is one of the largest food industries in the world and it is rooted in corruption and child abuse.
The AP’s report focused on two children, Ima and Olivia. Olivia is a Girl Scout in Tennessee who became worried about the ingredient in the cookies she was selling and its ties to child slave labor. Ima is a child slave.
As the AP reports:
Ima is among the estimated tens of thousands of children working alongside their parents in Indonesia and Malaysia, which supply 85% of the world’s most consumed vegetable oil. An Associated Press investigation found most earn little or no pay and are routinely exposed to toxic chemicals and other dangerous conditions. Some never go to school or learn to read and write. Others are smuggled across borders and left vulnerable to trafficking or sexual abuse. Many live in limbo with no citizenship and fear being swept up in police raids and thrown into detention.
The AP used U.S. Customs records and the most recently published data from producers, traders and buyers to trace the fruits of their labor from the processing mills where palm kernels were crushed to the supply chains of many popular kids’ cereals, candies and ice creams sold by Nestle, Unilever, Kellogg’s, PepsiCo and many other leading food companies, including Ferrero – one of the two makers of Girl Scout cookies.