Chocolate and child labor

 

Somehow, it’s just not going to taste as good when I know a seven-year-old harvested the crop to make the chocolates I just bought…

I saw this article at another website. Let’s just say that I’ve always been a very enthusiastic consumer of chocolate, but it seems I need to rethink that stance. We specifically shop with entities that do not support or utilize child or sweatshop labor. Little did I know that the chocolate I’ve been eating is a product of child labor, too.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/24/news/international/chocolate_bittersweet.fortune/index.htm

Outside the village of Sinikosson in southwestern Ivory Coast, along a trail tracing the edge of a muddy fishpond, Madi Ouedraogo sits on the ground picking up cocoa pods in one hand, hacking them open with a machete in the other and scooping the filmy white beans into plastic buckets. It is the middle of the school day, but Madi, who looks to be about 10, says his family can’t afford the fees to send him to the nearest school, five miles away. “I don’t like this work,” he says. “I would rather do something else. But I have to do this.”

Sinikosson, accessible only by rutted jungle tracks, is a long way from the luxurious chocolate shops of New York and Paris. But it is here, on small West African farms like these, that 70 percent of the world’s cocoa beans are grown – 40 percent from just one country, Ivory Coast. It’s not only the landscape that is tough. Working and living conditions are brutal. Most villages lack electricity, running water, health clinics or schools. And to make ends meet, underage cocoa workers, like Madi and the two boys next to him, spend their days wielding machetes, handling pesticides and carrying heavy loads.

This type of child labor isn’t supposed to exist in Ivory Coast. Not only is it explicitly barred by law – the official working age in the country is 18 – but since the issue first became public seven years ago, there has been an international campaign by the chocolate industry, governments and human rights organizations to eradicate the problem. Yet today child workers, many under the age of 10, are everywhere. Sometimes they’re visibly scarred from their work. In the village of Lilo a young boy carrying a machete ambled along a road with a bandaged shin. He said he had cut his leg toiling in a cocoa patch.

It seems that the chocolate industry refused to implement a labeling system.

The controversy came to a head in 2001, when U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) introduced legislation mandating a labeling system for chocolate. The industry fought back, and a compromise was reached establishing a voluntary protocol by which chocolate companies would wean themselves from child labor, then certify that they had done so. The certification process would not involve labeling of products, but it would call for public reporting by African governments, third-party verification and poverty remediation by 2005. When none of those deadlines was met, the protocol was extended until July 2008. To turn up the heat, the U.S. Department of Labor contracted with Tulane University to monitor progress.

Seven years to certify that there was actually some action on not compelling seven-year-olds to work in the industry? Thanks, guys. In the meantime, the kids working there get no education, are frequently injured on the job, and there’s no end in sight.

The industry’s evident lack of compliance with Harkin-Engel puts everyone involved in a difficult position. New coercive legislation requiring “child-labor-free” labeling could cause trouble for the large cocoa exporters and chocolate manufacturers if there were boycotts of non-labeled chocolate. But impoverished farmers in Ivory Coast say loss of markets would also hurt them and their children. Since the idea was first floated in 2001, the chocolate industry has taken the same position: Labeling “would hurt the people it is intended to help,” says Susan Smith, a spokeswoman for the Chocolate Manufacturers Association and the World Cocoa Foundation.

There is fair-trade chocolate on the market, but it accounts for no more than 1 percent of global supply – and the movement has little traction in Ivory Coast. A more effective way to combat child labor would be for the government of Ivory Coast to invest some of the revenue it gets from high taxes on cocoa exporters in education and social services to help poor farmers. But the government of Ivory Coast is ranked among the most corrupt in the world by Transparency International, a nongovernmental watchdog group. And it seems happier making excuses than changes.

So, here’s the rub: Do we keep eating “blood chocolate” because the collapse of the chocolate industry in these countries would bring even more poverty? Do we seek out fair-trade or “cruelty-free” chocolate, and hope that there’s enough of a demand that the chocolate industry decides it’s in their best interests to finally clean up and monitor what’s going on on the Ivory Coast? One thing’s for sure: We’re paying a pretty hefty karma price for compelling a child to work for the designer chocolate we just ate, aren’t we?

-S