[Chocolate doleur I, which provides a lot more historical background, is here]
Valentines Day — aka chocolate day — is coming up. And while I’m all about yummy chocolates, I’m peeved that a lot of the choco in the US could still be tainted by illegal child labor. Yes, US children’s favorite candy’s also the bane of children growing up in the Ivory Coast, who get sold into slave-like labor and toil in the fields to produce the sweet stuff.
Half the world’s chocolate comes from the Ivory Coast. And while choco demand’s been growing — and western companies getting rich off of that demand — the people who toil to farm and harvest the stuff have yet to see the benefits of this choco-love.
Why are choco farmers so poor? Often, they have no financial or political clout to bring about any changes. Many don’t even have transportation to get their goods to market — so they’re left at the mercy of buyers who do have transport vehicles. These buyers dictate the price; and these buyers, in turn, can get screwed by other middlemen and even police officers who block the roads,demanding bribes.
All this is covered in BBC’s “Our World Bitter Sweet,” a short 2007 documentary in which journalist Humphrey Hawksley looks into why child labor’s still used to produce chocolate. The problem, really, should’ve been taken care of already. Back in 2001, US 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. That deadline came and went — with big choco corps saying they need more time. A new deadline was set to make half the farms free of child labor monitor the use of child labor in half the farms in the Ivory Coast and Ghana by July 2008.
And guess what: Things still aren’t looking good. Humphrey reported that even pilot projects have been abandoned, due to lack of funding that the choco-corps were supposed to provide — a far cry from actually resolving these labor issues.
We’ll see what goes down in July. The really sad part in all of this is that, due to these labor abuses, big corporations can buy chocolate cheaply — and thus sell them very cheaply. Then, when fair trade chocolate comes on the market, the ethically-produced stuff looks horribly overpriced compared to the slave-labor stuff. We, the US public, are fooled into thinking that the “normal” cost of chocolate should be dirt cheap — and feel we’re somehow being overcharged when fair trade chocolate ends up costing considerably more.
More on this — and on finding choco that’s sweet in all ways in time for Valentine’s Day — on Monday. In the meantime, read about Sweet Earth Organic Chocolates, a fair trade company in California that’s trying to raise awareness and bring more yummy fair trade chocolates to the US.
[crossposted on BlogHer]
>> Update, 3/1/08: Fair trade groups asked big bad choco companies to sign the “Commitment to Ethical Cocoa Sourcing,” which makes a tougher statement about ethical cocoa sourcing than the Harkin-Engel Protocol. Any guess as to the big choco companies’ reactions?
Photo Courtesy of the International Labor Rights Fund
January 21st, 2008 at 1:29 am
Good post. That’s why it’s important to spend that little bit more to buy fair trade chocolate.
January 21st, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Thanks for the props :) I had Theo’s fair trade choco over the weekend — Madagascar. Yum!
February 11th, 2008 at 4:09 am
Siel, Great post.
I’m sorry to be late in adding this, but the new goal for the cocoa protocol is NOT to “make half the farms free of child labor by July 2008.” - though that is the reasonable, logical assumption.
Rather, if one has the time to read the announcements carefully the goal is only to MONITOR half of the cocoa-farming areas in two countries - the Ivory Coast & Ghana. There is in fact NO plan to actually ensure that any portion of cocoa exported from any country is free of forced child labor.
One way that the industry and their collaborators in this further the mis-understanding is that repeatedly talk about their approach as constituting a “certification” plan - when in fact it is very far from that. (For example, no exports or product would actually carry any certification - strange, eh?)
Also, you might think that monitoring is tantamount to preventing child labor, but again, upon close inspection of what’s being proposed, that is not the case. All that the industry is really promising is that by July 08 they’ll have a statistically representative data set describing the occurrence of child labor (forced and voluntary) in certain areas.
I’ll forgive your readers if they’re underwhelmed by it all.
March 1st, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Thanks for the clarification, Rodney. I just update the post –
In a way, it’s almost sort of moot to even talk about what the protocol actually demands, considering that the choco companies seem not to care about meeting these demands, however low they are –