Slavery shame of Easter eggs

According to International Labour Organisation figures, 12,000 children have been trafficked from countries such as Mali and Burkina Faso to the Ivory Coast, where they work long hours for no pay and little food on the cocoa plantations.

Hundreds of thousands more help out on family farms in west Africa, in often hazardous conditions which put their health at risk and keeps them out of school, charities said.

Stop the Traffik, an anti-slavery coalition which is backed by Amnesty International, World Vision and Tearfund, is demanding the major chocolate manufacturers certify chocolate with a "traffick-free" guarantee so consumers can eat chocolate without unwittingly supporting child slave labour.

Stop the Traffik believes the root of the problem is the abject poverty of the farmers - which drives them to seek cheap or free labour - and is demanding more money from the multibillion-pound industry to protect children.

But British chocolate manufacturers said they believed trafficking was "unacceptable" and the industry was investing in a region-wide certification scheme to tackle the issue.

Stop the Traffik chairman Steve Chalke said: "These youngsters come from a background of poverty, and are even knowingly sold by their parents sometimes.

"Often what will happen is the parents are starving, they're poor, they have nothing and somebody comes along and says 'I'll take your son, he'll work on my farm and I'll give you some money.

"They think 'we'll get money so we can eat and our son gets a job'. They don't know what he's going to is a living hell.

"They are being hit, they have been taken from their mothers, they effectively have no freedom, no escape, there's no pay, little food, no education - and we sit here munching through our chocolate bars."