As holiday shoppers eye chocolate bunnies and other sweets this week, a former top lobbyist for Nestlé USA Inc. is focusing her attention on an agreement the candy company signed to reduce child labor in the cocoa industry.
Nestlé has deployed its former vice president of government relations, Louise Hilsen, now at Kelley Drye & Warren, to lobby on a U.S. Department of Labor initiative to help carry out a 13-year-old pact between chocolate makers to decrease child labor in cocoa farming in the Ivory Coast and Ghana, according to a lobbying registration report filed with Congress on Thursday. The paperwork doesn’t elaborate on what Nestlé is looking to see in the implementation of the Department of Labor’s “Framework of Action” for the ” Harkin-Engel Protocol.”
