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 –

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.