In 2001, media outlets across the country began reporting the scandalous mistreatment of laborers in African cocoa farms, where the main ingredient in chocolate is produced. More than six years later, as Americans buy up massive amounts of chocolate to give for Valentine’s Day, many of these laborers, many of them children, remain at work in slave-like conditions despite these reports. If there is any hope for reform on these plantations, more consumers must become aware of this disgrace so that chocolate producers enforce safe labor practices.

The situation today is impossible to ignore. According to a report released in 2002 by the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, a government-supported organization, the number of children pressed into harvesting the beans numbered in the hundreds of thousands. In many west African nations — where about 70 percent of cacao beans are produced — plantation owners lure homeless children to work their farms under brutal conditions for no pay, according to a report released in 2007 by the U.S. State Department.

Americans are often deluged with guilt-inducing exposes on the products they buy, but this is no time to become desensitized to these reports. Without public awareness, many cacao producers will continue abusing laborers undisturbed, their revenues safe from bans or boycotts. Businesses, governments and human rights groups all have a part to play in monitoring cocoa farms and ensuring the beans harvested through forced or unsafe labor never make it to the market. U.S. lawmakers should continue pressuring chocolate companies and cocoa manufacturers to vet imports for beans produced using slave labor.

If public awareness truly fails to bring about change, the ultimate responsibility will lie with the chocolate companies that purchase this tainted cash crop. These companies form the only group that can directly force cocoa farms to improve their labor practices by threatening to cut off cocoa bean purchases. With the payments they make to suppliers, chocolate manufacturers control farmers’ fortunes, so it follows that these corporations should take the lead in eliminating modern day slavery in an industry associated with treats and happiness.

This is not yet the time to protest or boycott chocolate companies. Any effort to pressure these companies would likely fail for a lack of awareness anyway. Many Americans still do not know chocolate is produced using forced labor, which is the crux of the problem. Still, industry leaders should not downplay its severity. Conditions on these farms remain unacceptable despite symbolic attention from foreign and local governments. Chocolate manufacturers should highlight the offending producers and advertise the real efforts they are taking to combat the practice.

The companies should recognize that the safest way to preserve a good name is by aggressively rooting out poor labor practices. Manufacturers have the responsibility to take the leadership role in this effort — not consumers, not interest groups and certainly not African governments. If the industry adopts this cause as its own, it can expect good publicity to follow. If producers seek to cover up the problem through advertising campaigns, however, it may find public sentiment much harder to tame.