To my fellow academics who care about fair trade and wanna eradicate child slavery — here’s an opportunity for you.
The US govt wants you to “provide oversight of government and private industry efforts to develop and implement mechanisms to eliminate the worst forms of child labor (WFCL) in the cocoa sector in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana.”
As many of you know, child labor’s a huge problem in the Ivory Coast — an issue that NGOs like Global Exchange have been working hard to get some action on.
Qualifications: You gotta be part of a university-affiliated center or organizational unit at a university with 4,000 or more students with expertise in African studies, child labor, and business ethics.
The chosen contractor will be able to evaluate the various programs and initiatives — such as fair trade efforts — out there. From what I can decipher from the govt. language, your org would get $6.5 million over 3 years to provide oversight, reporting annually to both the Congress and USDOL/ILAB (U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs).
Interested? The application, along with more info, is here.
Since I’m in Sweden I can’t, but I encourage every academic in the US to do this. Everything cleans cocoa from dirt is good!
Comment by Malin (the Chocolate Lover) — July 16, 2006 @ 2:17 am
SAN LUIS OBISPO, California—July 13, 2006—Associate Professor Dr. Tom Neuhaus of the Food Science and Nutrition Department, Cal Poly University, San Luis Obispo, California is coloring his academic interests with an activist brush. For three years, Dr. Neuhaus has been interested in why West African cocoa farmers who face no competition from American or European farmers are poorer today than they were a generation ago.
“In Africa, poverty is at the root of AIDs, child slavery, and violence,†said Dr. Neuhaus. “In Côte d’Ivoire, more than 600,000 farmers grow the beans for our M&Ms, Snickers, and Hershey bars. The children of these farmers have little opportunity to follow their passions. Instead, the majority are locked into lives of cutting open cocoa pods, extracting their seeds, fermenting and drying them.â€
On August 22, Dr. Neuhaus will charter a small van in order to purchase boots and farm implements in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire and distribute them to five villages in the region around Daloa and Issia. He will then visit two fair-trade-certified™ cocoa cooperatives and a school, Kedesch, dedicated to educating or training the children of cocoa farmers. He will travel with Evariste Plégnon, an Ivoirian, and Dale Landis, a home builder from San Luis Obispo, who sees the trip as an opportunity to understand causes of poverty in Africa.
Dr. Neuhaus is looking for two others who have traveled in rugged circumstances and who want to learn more about the cocoa business and about Côte d’Ivoire, which supplies 75% of the beans used in American chocolate. The cost of the trip is approximately $4200; it will last 9 days. $500 of the trip’s cost will be used to purchase supplies for the five villages.
To learn more about the trip and how to get involved, write Dr. Neuhaus at tneuhaus@calpoly.edu.
Comment by Orval — July 16, 2006 @ 4:11 pm
Orval — Thanks for letting me know about this! I’ll def. contact Neuhaus to find out more :)
Comment by Siel — July 18, 2006 @ 2:24 pm