Your Hershey’s habit is ruining the world.
A new study by Lehigh University found a link between cocoa production and higher deforestation rates in the developing nations that grow the sweet stuff.
According to World Cocoa Foundation, African countries Ghana and Ivory Coast — which saw a poverty rate of 48.9 percent in 2008 according to the International Monetary Fund — export more than 70 percent of the world’s cocoa.
Mark Noble, an anthropology professor at Lehigh University, says that our chocoholic society is partly to blame for this troubling trend. “[There’s] more demand and changing cultivation strategies,” he writes in a press release.
It’s not just trees that are taking a hit. Consider that, while cocoa prices increased by 13 percent in 2015, the average farmer lives below the international poverty line, as Fortune reported in 2016.
Worse yet, a 2010 BBC documentary, “Panorama, Chocolate,” found that child labor fuels a large part of the chocolate industry in West Africa. (The year the film came out, the chocolate industry pledged to decrease child labor in Ivory Coast by 70 percent come 2020.)
Something to think about the next time you’re standing in front of the vending machine.