This year
human rights advocates are harnessing the political crisis in Ivory Coast, the
world’s largest cocoa producer, to add momentum to an ongoing campaign to force
the world’s chocolate makers to improve their labor practices.
Supporters
of the internationally recognized winner of Ivory Coast’s election also have
pushed for a cocoa ban in an effort to financially strangle incumbent leader
Laurent Gbagbo, who the UN says lost the November election.
“It’s
clear that the taxes that come from cocoa go directly to keeping Gbagbo in
power. That’s why we called for an export ban and it seems to be working,” said
Patrick Achi, spokesman for internationally recognized winner Alassane
Ouattara, who is now trying to run the country from a hotel.
Years of
campaigning by “fair trade” consumers already have forced chocolate makers to
sign onto to agreements to help clean up the cocoa supply chain. But little has
changed in the decade since the US Congress passed the Harkin-Engel Protocol to
introduce a “no child slavery” label for chocolate marketed in the United
States.
Some 1.8
million children aged 5 to 17 years work on cocoa farms in Ivory Coast and
Ghana, according to the fourth annual report produced by Tulane University
under contract to the US Department of Labor to monitor progress in the
protocol.
The
report says 40 percent of the 820,000 children working in cocoa in Ivory Coast
are not enrolled in school, and only about 5 percent of the Ivorian children
are paid for their work.
“These
companies are getting incredible profits while often the farmers are getting
really pennies,” said Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at
the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington-based think tank.
Campaigns
recently have begun targeting The Hershey Company because it is the only major
chocolate producer in the world that hasn’t made a commitment to use certified
cocoa, activists say. Hershey’s, though, says it is working to improve lives in
local communities.
“Our
focus is on-the-ground programs that promote sustainable livelihoods in West
Africa,” said Hershey’s spokesman Kirk Saville. “Hershey’s support for cocoa
communities goes back more than 50 years. We have helped to develop more
productive agriculture practices, to build educational and community resources
and to eliminate exploitative labor practices.” But the Tulane University
report on child labor in cocoa farms in Ivory Coast and Ghana found chocolate
makers have reached less than 4 percent of cocoa-growing communities in Ivory
Coast and less than 14 percent of communities in Ghana.
“The
industry has invested far more in programs in Ghana, where the worst abuses are
not quite as prevalent as in the Ivory Coast,” said Timothy Newman, campaigns
director of the Washington D.C.-based International Labor Rights Forum.
Newman
also said children from the neighboring countries of Mali and Burkina Faso also
continue to be trafficked to Ivorian farms, where 40 percent of the world’s
cocoa is produced.
Ivorian
government statistics indicate that more than 37,000 children are forced to
work, according to the UN
International
Labor Organization’s Alexandre Soho, senior program officer for Africa on the
elimination of child labor.
The
industry says it has spent more than $75 million to support implementation of a
cocoa certification system.
However,
the Tulane study found partners on the ground received only $5.5 million
between 2001 and 2009, and that those working in Ivory Coast received only $1.2
million from the industry.
Activists
argue that the answer is simple: pay farmers more and they will be able to
afford to send their kids to school instead of to work. Most children are put
to work on small family plots, often wielding dangerous tools like machetes and
using hazardous substances such as insecticides.
But
critics say that a chocolate boycott only hurts the farmers and their families,
who are trying to make a living even if the wages are not “fair trade” ones.
“The
essential problem from the very beginning, was that the large chocolate
companies were hiding behind the Harkin-Engel Protocol which is an entirely
voluntary agreement with no enforcement mechanism. As a result, they have been
able to continually drag their feet in taking responsibility for labor rights
abuses in their own cocoa supply chains,” Newman said.
“Many of
the initiatives developed under this process have never addressed the critical
underlying issues that lead to egregious labor rights abuses like the low
prices paid to cocoa farmers for their beans and the lack of negotiating power
that small-scale farmers have in the global chocolate supply chain. Problems
like these continue to fuel abuse.”
