TROUBLING TAG-ALONGS

Hidden Link Found Between Child Labor and Girl Scout Cookies

An eagle-eyed 14-year-old Girl Scout noticed that the cookies she was peddling were tainted.

The Girl Scouts is “supposed to be about making the world a better place,” according to 14-year-old girl scout Olivia Chaffin. So when she found out that Girl Scout cookies may contain palm oil that is produced unsustainably and in large part by child labor, she smelled hypocrisy. She started a petition to get the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. to remove palm oil from their cookies, and until then she has stopped selling them, she told the Associated Press. An AP investigation, which found that tens of thousands of children work on palm oil plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia, traced the child labor to palm kernel processing mills and to supply chains for major companies like Nestle, Kellogg’s, Pepsi and Ferrero, one of the makers of Girl Scout cookies. Many of the children who work on the plantations are children of migrants who don’t have the chance to go to school.