Who knew that child labor, slavery, and chocolate had such a rich and frightening menage-a-trois?
Frequent readers of green LA girl know how the coffee crisis came to be. Now, about cocoa: Thing’s have kinda sucked for the cocoa industry for the past couple decades — the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund made the Ivory Coast get rid of its cocoa board and government supported price system — leaving small farmers on their own. Which, you know, led to labor problems.
Back in 1999, Bill Clinton signed an executive order prohibiting federal agencies from buying products made using forced or indentured child labor — but cocoa and chocolate were not on the list of banned products.
So the US congress got involved in 2001, when the House of Representatives passed the Harkin-Engel Protocol, which created the International Cocoa Initiative foundation and committed the chocolate industry into ending child slavery in its supply chain by July 1, 2005.
And in May 2002, chocolate manufacturers, human rights groups and the Ivory Coast Government signed a pact to end child labour in West Africa, where more than half of the world’s chocolate’s grown. By July 1, 2005, standards wereto be established to identify cocoa grown without child slave labor.
By 2005, the chocolate mongers hadn’t done shit. You can read Harkin and Engel’s comments on it here.
So Global Exchange sued the three biggie coffee companies — Nestlé, Archer Daniels Midland, and Cargill Incorporated — all based in Glendale, Calif.
Which brings us to now. The lawsuit’s still going on.
The problem with the choco situation is that boycotting is clearly not the answer. According to Knight Ridder: “Lots of experts say boycotting chocolate could make things worse for the boys working on cocoa farms. People from Anti-Slavery International and UNICEF and cocoa industry analysts say that if lots of people stop buying chocolate, it could drive down the price of cocoa. That means less money for everyone involved in cocoa production, especially the farmers. Farmers who use slaves already say it’s because they don’t make enough to pay the boys. If the farmers make even less money, more boys may work for nothing.”
Some more positive stuff to come, in part II –
March 18th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
won’t dig this line of argumentation, “don’t boycott, because it will only make matters worse”, sorry!!!
boycott them (Nestlé & Co.) now, because there are already alternatives!
March 20th, 2006 at 7:27 pm
Well, I meant more that boycotting chocolate from the Ivory Coast won’t do much good. The prob is that a lot of the fair trade chocolate out there isn’t from the Ivory Coast. Which means we need to find a way to encourage more fair trade growth in the Ivory Coast with our purchases…
March 21st, 2006 at 4:23 pm
One minor correction, Cargill in the United States of America (USA) is headquartered just outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is not based in Glendale, CA as mentioned in your post.
Cargill: United States
Cargill Office Center
P.O. Box 9300
Minneapolis, MN 55440
Tel: 952-742-7575