AFRICANEWS

ChildRights

West Africa

The bitter taste of chocolate: Child labour in Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana

Child labour

Chocolate companies in the West are finally starting to wake up to the reality that child labour is being used on the cocoa plantations that supply the companies with the raw material to make their chocolate. Some key players in the U.S. and Britain are starting to make noise on the issue, although they have a long way to go.

The U.S. Chocolate Manufacturers' Association (CMA) has pledged to help fight child labour in Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana, countries that are the world's leading producers of cocoa.

Owners and managers of the countries' expansive cocoa plantations use children to clear land for the planting of cocoa trees, weed the plantations, harvest the crops, and perform other duties. The children are unpaid or paid pitiful amounts. Cote d'Ivoire is the world's largest producer of cocoa, accounting for 40 percent of the world output, while Ghana ranks second. Extracts from cocoa are used in the beverage industry and also to make chocolate.

CMA intends to come up with an action plan that will build upon the results of a study of some 3,000 farms in Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana. The CMA, which brings together some of the leading chocolate manufacturers such as Hershey, Nestle USA, and M&M Mars, has stated that it will collaborate with other trade associations and the two governments to find ways to eradicate this exploitation of children.

The move by CMA came a few weeks after chocolate companies in Britain vowed that they would enact measures to curb the use of child labourers in the plantations. The companies were reacting to a Channel 4 documentary that reported that most of the cocoa imported into the country was produced using child labour, especially in Cote d'Ivoire.

With cocoa being the one of the largest foreign exchange earners for the two countries, high-level delegations immediately left Abidjan and Accra for London in the middle of June to "present the actual picture" after Cote d'Ivoire's ambassador to the UK, Kouadio Adjoumani, called the documentary "nonsense" and "wildly inaccurate. "The absurdity of the claim that 90 percent of farms use slave labour is shown up by the simple fact that this would mean that nearly every one of the 700,000 farmers employs slaves, patently nonsense as anyone with any knowledge of our country would know," he had said.

But much as the delegations tried to use softer language to deal with the British Foreign Office, they agreed with the ambassador's sentiments. The Ivorian delegation defended the cocoa farmers by accusing the chocolate multinationals of deliberately keeping cocoa prices low, consequently consigning the farmers to live in poverty.

In the face of low prices, most of the cocoa farmers have resorted to using cheap labour, which is a breeding ground for slavery. Therefore, if slavery is to be eradicated, said Cote d'Ivoire Prime Minister Pascal N'Guessan, then the chocolate giants must pay more to the farmers. This, he said, will ensure quality of life for the seven million Ivorians who depend on cocoa farming and also discourage poorer families from selling their children to traffickers.

At the end of the meeting, the British Foreign Office minister Brian Wilson promised to set up a task force to investigate the use of child labourers. Wilson, who had also indicated that he would meet later with chocolate executives to persuade them to offer a better price, ruled out a boycott of the cocoa imports claiming such a measure would deepen "the poverty on which slavery thrives."

World cocoa prices are at a 10-year low, with some farmers having been forced to burn small amounts of the crop to boost the prices. The low prices are blamed on overproduction and middlemen who have invaded the now deregulated cocoa market. These brokers prohibit small farmers from dealing directly with the large firms, which take away the farmers' bargaining power. The brokers also do not disclose the source of their cocoa, making it hard to identify cocoa that was produced using child labour.

With the spotlight having been cast on the industry, international cocoa traders and manufacturers were quick to say that the documentary was exaggerated. "We do not believe that the farms visited by the programme are in the least representative of cocoa farming in Cote d'Ivoire, although the claims cannot be ignored," said the Biscuit, Cake Chocolate, and Confectionery Alliance (BCCCA). BCCCA denied fixing prices and instead blamed the low prices on the "laws of supply and demand. "We have relatively high production, relatively high stocks and fairly static demand. Unfortunately that is not a recipe for high prices," said John Newman, BCCC's spokesman.

But even with this chest thumbing, the industry was on the defensive. Cadbury, which imports 90 percent of its cocoa from Ghana, quickly promised to fight the use of child labour in the cocoa plantations. "What we need to do is to support the efforts of those African governments which are trying to tackle this," said company spokesman Richard Frost. He was quick to add that such a campaign needs to be done on a worldwide level since the use of child labour is not confined to the chocolate industry alone.

None of these chocolate giants, however, have announced concrete plans on how they will deal with the issue of child labour, nor have they pledged to expose offenders in the industry. There are also no indications that these conglomerates will offer better prices. Also unsettling is silence by Western countries, which are the largest consumers of chocolate.

So far, the only country that has set aside funds to deal with the issue is Japan, which last month announced that it would donate US$980,000 to Benin to support efforts to reduce poverty and combat child trafficking in Benin.

It was from Benin that the ugly face of child slavery reared its head in April, when a Nigerian registered ship, Mv Etinero was impounded while trafficking child slaves from different countries in the sub-region.

Early this month, Benin's National Assembly ratified the 1998 International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 182 that prohibits the worst forms of child labour and the 1990 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. At the same time in Mali, the country's parliament approved a law that would make child trafficking punishable by five to 20 years in prison. Mali took such an action as it is currently short of funds to repatriate, rehabilitate and resettle 15, 000 Mali child slaves currently working in Cote d'Ivoire in conditions that have been described as akin to hell. Nigeria recently passed a similar bill that aims to deal with human traffickers.

Noble as such efforts are, monitoring the use of child workers is both an expansive and expensive exercise. This is due to a shortage of personnel and resources to track down perpetrators, and the complicated nature of legitimate business operations in the concerned countries. For example, the entrance of middlemen in the cocoa industry who are only interested in the crop means that they will look the other way as long as production goes on.

On April 17, Red Cross societies in sixteen West African nations announced that they would set up teams to monitor the region's main ports and track down traffickers. But it is not easy to monitor the West African coastline, as there is no international naval presence in the area. The Royal British Navy used to have a ship in the area until the 1990s, but withdrew it because of budget cuts.

So the war to fight a menace that was criminalised by the UN General Assembly in 1994 is far from being won. According to a report commissioned by UNICEF last year, about 200,000 children are trafficked each year in the West and Central Africa sub-region alone, with minors being purchased for as little as US$10 from Benin, Togo, Mali, Niger and Nigeria. They are then shipped to work with no pay in homes, cocoa and coffee plantations, fishing boats and mines in Cameroon, Gabon, Cote D'Ivoire, The Gambia and Equatoria Guinea. Some from Nigeria are even purchased to work as sex slaves.

The children are vulnerable because of poverty and wars that have disrupted people's lives in the past decade. Analysts also agree that the opening up of common borders by the regional trade body, ECOWAS, to promote free trade has also contributed to the problem, since it makes it difficult to distinguish between criminal trafficking and cross-border migration. UNICEF, the World Bank, and ILO agree that poverty is the largest causal factor in the shipment of children.

Data by the three institutions estimates that 40 percent of the population in West Africa lives below the poverty line, with the level in some countries being as high as 72 percent. "In the past few years, because of the deteriorating economic situation, there has been a much bigger trade in children�particularly large plantations which need a lot of cheap labour, obedient labour and children are perfect for that," says Esther Guluma, a UNICEF official in Benin. And with most of the governments possessing inadequate legislation against child trafficking and labour, the perpetrators have a field day.

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