According to a new report by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, a Maryland-based research organization, a solid majority of Americans – 69 percent – believes Africa is important to the United States. Of six regions of the world mentioned in a Newsweek poll cited in the report, Africa was the one about which

the highest percentage of respondents – 47 percent – said the United States was not concerned enough.

The report represents a remarkable shift. Just five years ago, less than half of Americans favored increasing U.S. aid to Africa, but by last fall it had soared to 81 percent. Secretary of State Colin Powell has said he is particularly interested in trying to improve conditions in Africa; these findings suggest a strong base of public support.

A good place to start in improving conditions – one in which the administration, Congress and the public can all meet – would be the abolition of slavery in the cocoa trade.

Anecdotal reports have circulated for years that slave labor was being used in Ivory Coast, the poor West African country that grows 43 percent of the world’s cocoa beans, the raw material in chocolate. A 1998 UNICEF study found extensive use of slaves, primarily children, as does a new study by the Swiss-based International Labor Organization. The U.S. State Department estimates some 15,000 children between the ages of 9 and 12 have been sold into forced labor to work Ivory Coast plantations. Exhaustive investigations this year by both the BBC and the Philadelphia Inquirer describe in chilling detail the cruel recipe which blends the fruit harvested by enslaved children in Africa with milk and sugar to produce chocolate, that delicious treat enjoyed by more fortunate children, and adults, in Europe and the United States.

Americans spend some $13 billion a year on chocolate, an industry that includes such corporate giants as Hershey, Archer Daniels Midland, Kraft, General Mills, Cargill and Nestle. With that kind of clout, it would seem easy enough for the chocolate producers, on behalf of their customers and in the name of humanity, to demand the immediate end of slavery by Ivory Coast suppliers, to insist a product that epitomizes luxury does not contain such a hideous ingredient.

It has, however, been easier for this industry to employ the familiar tactics used whenever profit is derived from Third World abuses. The Chocolate Manufacturers Association and the trade group’s individual members denied for years any knowledge of slavery, despite the findings of UNICEF, the ILO and the State Department. It was only after the Inquirer laid the ugly story out this spring that the industry conceded that something should be done.

That something was for the industry to fund a study of cocoa-labor practices that is expected to cost between $1 million and $2 million – roughly one one-hundredth of 1 percent of the value of U.S. annual chocolate consumption. The chocolate manufacturers say they are powerless to do more at this time because slave-picked beans are mixed with the harvest of paid laborers before the cargo arrives on American docks, making immediate action against the enslavers impossible and harmful to ethical growers. They use this same point to argue against a consumer boycott of chocolate, in case such a thing would occur to consumers.

The CMA may be powerless against Ivory Coast cocoa farmers, but it’s ready to take on the United States Congress. In response to the Inquirer series, the House in late June passed by an overwhelming 291-115 vote a bill that would require chocolate products made or sold in this country to

be free of slave-picked cocoa and to be labeled as such. To help ensure that the Senate doesn’t make the same mistake when it takes up the matter this fall, the CMA has mounted an aggressive lobbying campaign to fight the labeling bill and has retained as its chief lobbyists two former Senate majority leaders – Bob Dole and Maine’s George Mitchell.

Still, it’s encouraging that a majority of Americans see Africa as important and deserving of our help. It will be shameful to learn that we draw the line at chocolate.