Girl Scouts “should focus on making the world a better place,” according to 14-year-old scout Olivia Chaffin. So, when she discovered that Girl Scout cookies may contain palm oil produced unsustainably and largely by child labor, she smelled hypocrisy. She initiated a petition for US Girl Scouts to remove palm oil from her cookies and, by then, she had 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 child labor to palm kernel processing factories and supply chains at major companies like Nestlé, Kellogg’s, Pepsi and Ferrero, one of the girl scout cookie makers. Many of the children who work on the plantations are the children of migrants who do not have the opportunity to go to school.
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