And as for the role of Big Chocolate:

The big cocoa exporters - Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM, Fortune 500), Barry Callebaut and Saf-Cacao - do not own plantations and do not directly employ child workers. Instead, they buy beans from Ivorian middlemen called pisteurs and treton. These middlemen own warehouses and fleets of flatbed trucks that travel deep into the jungle to buy cocoa from the small independent farmers who grow most of the crop. But labor and human rights activists charge that Big Chocolate has an obligation to improve working conditions on the farms where so many children toil.

Again, the idea that big corporations have human rights “obligations” is not exactly commonplace in the business press.

We asked Parenti how he had successfully pitched his article to Fortune, and he credited his girlfriend, Jessica Dimmock. Dimmock is a photographer who already had a working relationship with the magazine. She took the pictures for the piece on chocolate.

Parenti wasn’t sure why the business press might be interested in labor right now, but he did offer a general opinion on child-labor stories. These pieces have mass appeal, said Parenti, because they are “stark and simple.” Who, after all, supports the exploitation of children?

In fact, Parenti notes that his chocolate story is as much about the exploitation of parents as of their children—but that kind of angle doesn’t fly. Stories about laboring children, on the other hand, “have a perennial traction.”

Finally, here is Parenti on writing for a business magazine: writing for Fortune was pretty much like writing for a place like The Nation, Parenti says. “I expected it to be different.” He said he would pitch to Fortune again. “It’s not about where you write,” said Parenti, “It’s about what you get to write.”

• 1
• 2