Whenever you fish a packet of M&M’s out of the lunch bucket or brown bag, you probably munch the pebbly sweets without giving much thought to the chocolate center as your molars crunch down. But if the chocolate in the center came from the Ivory Coast of Africa, chances are that it was made from cocoa beans picked by child labor. Worse than that, some of that child labor was forced child labor. Worse than that, some of that labor was child slave labor, says a labor rights group.

On May 28, the New York Times reported that the International Labor Rights Fund planned to file a lawsuit against the U.S. Customs Service “for breaking American trade law and allowing African cocoa picked by indentured child labor to be imported into this country.” The Ivory Coast is a major producer and exporter of cocoa beans, brought here by the likes of Nestle, Cargill, Hershey and the ubiquitous Archer Daniels Midland Company, among others.

The labor rights group told the Times, “We are confident that if the Custom Service (sic) began an investigation the industry would take notice and find out whether indentured child labor was used to pick the cocoa beans.” Obviously, the rights group is convinced that forced child labor is used to harvest the cocoa crops, and, as it says, it has “grown impatient with the Customs Service for failing to investigate accusations that cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast used slave or indentured child labor.”

The Times reported that others have also charged that “plantation owners in the Ivory Coast buy children from neighboring countries like Mali to work in cocoa fields.” A 1998 Unicef report prepared by its Ivory Coast office confirmed that child traffickers brought children to the Ivory Coast to work, though it couldn’t estimate how many children were transported. Perhaps the Customs Service has merely overlooked a State Department report (2002), cited by the Times, which stated that “some forced labor and trafficking in children and women also persisted.”

The liberal labor rights group, founded in 1986 and currently headed by a labor lawyer, believes that a Customs Service investigation will force the agency to agree with the rights group that child labor practices in the Ivory Coast should trigger a provision in U.S. law that bans the importation of products made with forced child labor. Just the threat of a ban, the group expects, will lead major cocoa importers to assist the Ivory Coast farmers “to provide decent wages and basic rights to their workers.” That and proper monitoring systems with legal enforcement should “ensure an end to trafficked child labor in this industry,” the group maintains.

The Customs Service agreed to meet with the group in July, even though, as the Times reported, the federal agency declared, “We reject the charges against us and are in the process of writing a letter to the group explaining what we are doing…. We already enforce the law.”