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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Chances are good that child workers -- some of whom are slaves -- helped produce your valentine bonbons. The chocolate industry has promised to get kids out of the cocoa trade. But profits still come before progress.
Feb 14, 2003 | Of the $1.1 billion in boxed chocolates that Americans are expected to buy on Valentine's Day, very little will be untainted by the scourge of child labor. Although some who buy those bonbons will do so without knowing the sinister history of their purchases, others, like the chocolate makers, will have known for at least two years, if not longer, that cocoa beans imported from the Ivory Coast -- used to make nearly half the chocolate consumed in this country -- are harvested in large part by children, some as young as 9, and many of whom are considered slaves, trafficked from desperately poor countries like Mali and Burkina Faso.
The most recent survey of conditions on West African cocoa farms, completed by the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture for the U.S. Agency for International Development, estimated that nearly 300,000 children work in dangerous conditions on cocoa farms in the four countries surveyed -- Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon -- the vast majority of them in the Ivory Coast. The report, released in July 2002, says that of the 300,000 children, more than half (64 percent) are under 14 years old. Twelve thousand had no connection to the family on whose cocoa farm they toiled, but only 5,100 of them were paid for their work. Almost 6,000 were described as "unpaid workers with no family ties," provoking advocates to refer to them as "slaves." The rest work on their families' farms, kept home from school to do punishing work during the all-important harvest seasons. The latter category are, in the definition of the International Labor Organization, child laborers.
The existence, and the plight, of these children were publicly acknowledged by chocolate companies in 2001 after high-profile stories in the media -- most significantly, a documentary by the BBC and a prize-winning series by Knight Ridder reporters -- had exposed the horrific details of the children's lives, and their connection to the chocolate consumed, often by unknowing consumers, in this country.
And yet, despite committing themselves 16 months ago to a highly publicized four-year plan to abolish child slaves and laborers from the cocoa farms with whom they do business, the chocolate industry, worth billions a year in U.S. revenue alone, has managed to continue making and selling products without demonstrating any discernible progress in solving the child labor problem.
The chocolate companies say their efforts so far have been defeated by the chaos of civil war and the stubborn traditions of an agriculturally based society. But those who monitor child slavery around the world, and others who scrutinize the labor practices of American companies with factories abroad, insist that chocolate companies have failed to take serious steps to end the abhorrent labor practices.
"You have potentially conflicting interests here," says Alec Fyfe, senior advisor for child labor at UNICEF. On the one hand, Fyfe says, there's "an industry trying to protect itself from adverse publicity and [from] consumers walking away from their product." On the other, "a group interested in protecting children's interests. Where's the overlap?"
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Hershey's and M&M/Mars control two-thirds of the U.S. chocolate market, which generated $13 billion from retail sales of 3.1 billion pounds of chocolate in 2001. Both companies, along with other major producers like Nestlé, Archer Daniels Midland, Cadbury, Guittard and Bernard Callebaut, import cocoa beans from the Ivory Coast, which, as the largest cocoa producer in the world, provides almost half the cocoa beans that end up in America. Most of the cocoa from the Ivory Coast comes from 450,000 small farms of 12 acres or less.
In September 2000, a BBC documentary entitled "Slavery: A Global Investigation" featured a segment on boys enslaved on Ivory Coast cocoa farms, showing children with heavily scarred backs from beatings with whips and switches.
Awareness of the problem became more widespread in June 2001, when a four-part Knight Ridder series on the same topic told the stories of boys in the Ivory Coast, most of them 12 to 16 years old, some as young as 9, who had been sold and then tricked into indentured labor on cocoa farms. The boys told reporters that they were underfed, locked in their filthy sleeping quarters, and forced to work more than 12 hours a day, sometimes hauling 50-pound bags of beans that were bigger than they were.
Caught in the glare of negative publicity, representatives of the chocolate industry admitted the problem existed, but insisted they should not to be held responsible since chocolate companies didn't actually own the farms. But this argument didn't deflect continuing criticism, and the issue was taken up by two congressmen, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.). The Knight Ridder series came out the same week that an agricultural bill was up for a vote in the House of Representatives. After reading the newspaper articles, Engel quickly added a rider to that bill, proposing a federal system to certify -- and label -- qualified chocolate and cocoa products as "slave free," much in the way that tuna produced under certain federal guidelines can earn "dolphin safe" labeling. The measure passed the House of Representatives -- and created a potentially significant problem for Hershey's, Nestlé, M&M/Mars and the other major companies that wouldn't qualify for the "slave free" label.
Before the bill could reach the Senate, the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, a trade group that represents the major American chocolate makers, hired former senators George Mitchell and Bob Dole to lobby against it. With possible consumer boycotts and punishing federal regulation looming, chocolate companies found a way to deal with the issue -- and dodge the labeling bullet. According to a source on Capitol Hill who was involved in the talks between the industry and a handful of congressmen, Mitchell and Dole urged the chocolate companies to make a deal, saying, "Too many reporters are willing to go to Africa and get kids on record that they're slaves."
