Panorama: Chocolate – The Bitter Truth, Wednesday 9pm, BBC One

Posted by Stewart Turner

If you settled down to watch last night’s Panorama with a brick-sized bar of Dairy Milk on the arm of the sofa, the chances are it left a rather nasty taste in the mouth. Reporter Paul Kenyon got trussed up in his best Man from Del Monte finery and went undercover as a cocoa trader in West Africa, and the results were pretty shocking.

Cocoa’s only been growing in West Africa for a couple of hundred years since sweet-toothed colonial powers took it over from South America, but the Ivory Coast and Ghana are now the world’s biggest producers. Sadly it seems a fairly hefty amount of it is farmed by kids – some as young as eight – who’re smuggled over the border from the poverty of neighbouring Burkina Faso to work long days cracking open cocoa pods with machetes.

But surely the kindly men churning out our KitKats and Crunchies would something to say about that, right? Well, sort of. Kenyon found that one farm which uses child labour supplied a company selling cocoa to Nestlé, which means the next time you have a break it could be at the expense of an eight year old who doesn’t even know the meaning of the word.

Simply choosing Fairtrade is not all it’s cracked up to be either, with several members of one of its West African co-operatives suspended for using child labour. The Fairtrade label does at least add a degree of traceability to the manufacturing process: without it, its fair bet that those members would never have been uncovered.

There were some clunky vox pops with members of the Great British Public, who deemed child labour to be A Very Bad Thing Indeed, and Kenyon’s ‘Brit abroad’ pidgin English interviewing technique also left a bit of a bitter taste in the mouth. A shame, because it detracted from the alarming and often tragic facts.

It’s obviously a highly emotive and complex subject, but this Panorama film was seriously ham-fisted in its attempt to get to grips with it. Kenyon seemed unable to decide whether he wanted to reunite kids with there parents Surprise, Surprise-style, become a master chocolatier in a fancy London shop - or stick with the investigative journalism.