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| <back | home Chocolate and Child Slavery: the Heat is On by Tom Neuhaus The year 2001 was a year of many beginnings: June 7 marked the beginning of our now-widening economic train wreck with the Bush administration’s tax cut for the rich. September 11 marked the beginning of an immense military over-reaction to a situation that actually needed the skills of the U.S. State Department. And October 1 marked the beginning of the Harkin-Engel Protocol. Say what? In late 2000 and early 2001, a movie and a series of articles horrified the British viewing public by presenting stories of child enslavement and abusive child labor in some cocoa-growing areas of West Africa, notably Ivory Coast and Ghana. The story got short shrift on this side of the Atlantic but it was long enough for Eliot Engel (D-NY), a U.S. representative, to notice. Horrified, he approached Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) who had devoted much of his political career to child welfare issues. Together, and with the participation of organizations such as the U.N.’s International Labor Organization, and the World Cocoa Foundation, a six-point certification program was established to ensure, by July 1, 2005, that American chocolate would become slave-free. The deadline came and went, with little progress made — much to the chagrin of the protocol’s two authors. In February, 2005, frustrated with the American chocolate industry’s apparent low level of concern and activity, Harkin and Engel proclaimed that their wives would get flowers instead of chocolate for Valentine’s Day. This past summer, a three-year extension was reluctantly granted by the protocol’s authors. In July, the International Labor Rights Fund filed a lawsuit against Nestle’s, Archer Daniels Midland, and Cargill, alleging involvement in trafficking, torture and forced labor of Malian children enslaved to work on Ivory Coast farms. Global Exchange has since joined the lawsuit. This fall, Global Exchange and Sweet Earth Organic Chocolates, my company, designed a “Fair Trade is Boo-tiful” candy for Halloween that is being used to promote a Fair Trade alternative to mainstream chocolate products for trick-or-treaters. A bag of 36 candies comes with a postcard to mail to the chairman of Nestle’s asking him to use Fair Trade cocoa. This August, I traveled to Ivory Coast to research the causes of the child labor problems, whether the protocol will be effective and whether, as some claim, as I do, that Fair Trade is a legitimate way of combating abusive child labor in the cocoa fields. This article is a brief description of my trip and a summary of my findings. Ivory Coast and Ghana account for about 58% of the world’s cocoa (or cacao in much of the French and Spanish-speaking world). Ivory Coast accounts for approximately 75% of the cocoa used in American chocolate candy bars. We have an important commercial connection with Ivory Coast. Ghana, which is English speaking, seems to be a more logical connection, but American chocolate manufacturers prefer the less expensive Ivorian beans. Symbols of Ivorian cocoa beans’ importance are the enormous silos that tower over the Ivorian countryside. Many are owned by Archer Daniels Midland or Cargill, two of the five mega-corporations that control American agriculture. Cocoa beans are brought to these collection points by the employees of traitants, typically Lebanese families who know how to do business in unsettled places. Serving the traitants are the pisteurs. Typically Ivorian and Muslim, they buy the beans from the farmers, who represent a range of ethnicities and religions. At the time of my trip, they were receiving 150 CFA per kilo (13¢ per pound)—one-fifth the price established by the Ivorian government. It is this price disparity that is at the root of child labor issues. I flew to Abidjan, where I met Evariste, my assistant, whom I had met last summer and whom I had hired to set up interviews with cocoa farmers in three villages, Bateguedea, Depa and Zereguh. He picked me up at the airport after making a show of paying off the main airport police official (using my money, of course) so I didn’t have to break out my passport. We met Justice Whitaker, a young soon–to-be graduate of NYU’s film school, who would take video footage of our interviews to use in his film on the African farmer. The three of us spent two days in Abidjan, conducting interviews to get a variety of perspectives about child labor in the cocoa fields—from the Belgian manager of a chocolate plant, the head of the Sustainable Tree Crops Program, the director of the U.N. International Labor Organization in Ivory Coast, and two representatives of Ivorian cocoa cooperatives. An extra day was wasted while I recovered from some delicious but deadly passion fruit juice (laced, it turned out, with giardia), and we traveled from Abidjan to Daloa, located in the northern part of the cocoa belt. We began our journey sardined into a small bus. Twenty strong men pushed at the back of the bus to compensate for its defunct starter motor. The Mercedes diesel roared to life and we bounced down a rutted dirt road for two blocks, turned around, drove back to the “station” and waited another 30 minutes. The rest of the day was spent riding, disembarking, showing one’s passport to a machine-gun-toting military type, riding, disembarking, showing the passport, until we reached Daloa, one of the capitals of Ivory Coast’s cocoa belt. The next week saw us in vans or taxis, visiting villages, talking to farmers, and reconnecting with officials at Ivory Coast’s first fair trade-certified® cooperative, Kavokiva. A high point was our visit to a pilot project, the only one of its kind in Ivory Coast, located in the town of Galebre. Its directors warmly welcomed us, explaining that they had until then received no visitors from America or Europe. Unlike the farmers’ field schools, where people just talk, this project identifies children whose parents cannot afford to send them to school and places them in schools or vocational training. This is the sort of program that will make chocolate child-slavery free, but until now the program has received no outside funds; notably absent has been the chocolate industry’s World Cocoa Foundation. My new foundation, Project Hope and Fairness (www.projecthopeandfairness.org), has already donated $1,000 to help their mission. I asked virtually every interviewee whether child slavery exists in the cocoa fields; no one denied it but they also consistently added that the real problem is poverty. At the end of my trip, in Accra, Ghana, I met the director of a program that purchases the child slaves of fishermen and places them in school; so far, they have intervened for over 500 children by paying the fishermen using in-kind gifts. The real problem is, where does the money go? The farmer gets little. He is cheated by a system that involves excessive government taxes, out-of-control military and para-military, and middlemen. The chocolate companies are not powerless, however. They can do more than simply set up field schools. As an example, Barry-Callebaut, a large Swiss firm, has contracted with 60 Ivorian cooperatives to pay according to quality. Cooperatives cut out the middlemen. Extension agents hired by cooperatives and grading by quality help the farmer produce higher quality and earn more money. Fair Trade goes a long way to reverse the farmer’s decline. It establishes a price floor and a social premium that at Kavokiva is being used to build a clinic. It employs extension agents who teach farmers how to diversify, how to protect the environment, how to use chemicals, how to plant new cocoa varieties, and how to protect their children. Hopefully, as this story continues to unfold, American consumers will think before they bite. In Britain 7% of chocolate products sold are now fair trade. We are currently well under 1%. Let’s put our money where our mouths are. Visit these sites to learn more about how you, the consumer, can help: www.transfairusa.org and www.globalexchange.org. You can reach Tom Neuhaus at tom@sweetearthchocolates.com. Look for some of his company’s wonderful fair-traded and organic chocolate bars at HopeDance gigs, Splash Cafe, and other places around SLO. <back | top^ |