The head of TransAfrica Forum said major manufacturers of chocolate are "turning a blind-eye" to a horrible truth: thousands of children in West Africa have been kidnapped, sold into slavery and forced to work on sweltering plantations that produce half the world's cocoa.

The going price for a child slave from Mali: $30.

"It turns out that the hands are much smaller than many would have thought," Bill Fletcher, president of TransAfrica Forum told BlackAmericaWeb.com this week.

"In order to ensure the profits that they wish," Fletcher said, "the companies are prepared to either accept or turn a blind-eye to the use of child slaves or child laborers to do this work."

TransAfrica Forum is a leading non-profit organization that serves as a major research, educational, and organizing institution for the African-American community on issues related to Africa.

According to the BBC, children are taken from poor areas of Mali for just a few dollars to work as plantation slaves in neighboring countries like Ivory Coast. Some of the children, as young as 11 years old, are beaten if they try to escape the estimated 600,000 cocoa farms. Some of the children die from illness and malnutrition and in many cases they are fed corn paste as their only meal of the day.

Save the Children Canada reports that 15,000 children between the ages of nine and 12 have been sold into forced labor on cocoa farms on the Ivory Coast, West Africa, in the last few years. Most reports indicate that children are often trafficked from Mali, Burkina Faso, Togo and Benin, then brought into the Ivory Coast and other countries in West Africa.

"The growing global wealth polarization is illustrated by the cocoa industry," Fletcher said. "At the top of the chain, the people of the wealthy countries take for granted the sources of the cocoa and rarely think about the hands that make it all possible."

The UK, according to the BBC, has joined efforts to fight child labor and poverty on West African cocoa plantations, and a task force was also established to examine the problem. Chocolate manufacturers have been blamed for helping to create market conditions which encourage child slavery and poverty in the African cocoa industry. It is estimated that Americans spend more than $1 billion for chocolate on Valentine's Day.

Salia Kante, director of Mali's Save the Children Fund, told the BBC that "People who are drinking cocoa or coffee are drinking their blood. It is the blood of young children carrying ... cocoa sacks so heavy that they have wounds all over their shoulders. It's really pitiful to see."

The government of Cote d'Ivoire, in association with nine other countries, recently announced that it is participating in an international project to combat the trafficking of children for exploitative labor in West and Central Africa.

The BBC reports that many Ivory Coast farmers have ended up broke waiting for the price of cocoa to rise. Large warehouses in West Africa, the BBC reports, buy cocoa cheap and sell it on with a 100% mark-up. Law enforcement authorities say it's difficult to trace the origins of the plantations and prove whether child slavery is involved.

Meanwhile, over the past several years, children are forced to work, beaten, become ill, and in some cases, die. Police in Mali told reporters that files on missing children are piled high.

"The worsening of living conditions in many parts of Africa puts immense pressures on families to, quite literally, sell their children into de facto indentured servitude as a means of survival," said Fletcher.

He's hoping public awareness on the issue will create change from the consumption end.

"If we are going to consume the cocoa," Fletcher said, "then it is incumbent upon us to understand and address the conditions of labor that bring it about."