West Africa’s cocoa industry is still trafficking children and using forced child labor despite nearly a decade of efforts to eliminate the practices, an independent audit published by Tulane University said.
A US-sponsored solution called the Harkin-Engel Protocol was signed in 2001 by cocoa industry members to identify and eliminate cocoa grown using forced child labor. A child-labor-free certification process was supposed to cover 50 percent of cocoa growing regions in West Africa by 2005 and 100 percent by the end of this year. However, independent auditors at Tulane University’s Payson Center for International Development said in a report late last month that efforts have not even come close to these targets.
“Hundreds of thousands of children are involved in work on cocoa farms,” the report said.
Thousands of children travel from impoverished neighboring countries to the cocoa plantations in Ivory Coast, where some of them live in substandard conditions and receive little or no pay.
Research in border areas shows that only a tiny proportion of children in cocoa farming ever see a police officer on their way over the border, and that police officers are not properly trained to deal with such crossings. Almost none of the children have any contact with nongovernmental organizations or anti-child-labor organizations while working.
The Harkin-Engel Protocol set up community-based education and monitoring programs in Ivory Coast and Ghana — the world’s two largest cocoa growers — to improve the situation. The International Cocoa Initiative, an industry funded organization charged with implementing the protocol, said because of the protocol thousands of children are no longer working in exploitative conditions on cocoa plantations in both countries. But industry efforts are “uneven” and “incomplete,” the report said.
Less than 3 percent of cocoa growing villages have been visited by monitors in Ivory Coast and across the border in Ghana, only 13 percent of communities have been impacted by the program.
The Swiss non-governmental group Bern Declaration, which campaigns for fairness in international trade, said on Tuesday that the study’s findings prove the existence of “the worst forms of child labor on West African cocoa plantations and the fact that efforts to date by the chocolate industry to prevent this have failed.”
The Ivorian government admits that progress has been slower than anticipated, but points to several key advances.
“Last week, we passed a law prohibiting the worst forms of child labor,” said Mokie Sigui, head of the anti child labor taskforce at the Ministry of Labor. “Some infractions carry 20-year prison sentences.”
Sigui said the government was building two youth centers in cocoa-growing regions where exploited children can be identified and then put back into school.
Manufacturers in the chocolate industry have also set up projects to help keep kids in schools and off the plantations, but the poverty of many families in West Africa makes it impossible for them to pass up the temptation to send their children to work.
“We need to help improve the social and economic situation there so that people can help themselves,” said Franz Schmid, spokesman for the Association of Swiss Chocolate Manufacturers, Chocosuisse.
He also said that cocoa companies need to know where raw materials come from.
Several international certification bodies are working to certify sustainable cocoa farms across the region. Though only 4 percent of the world’s cocoa is now considered sustainable, that figure is projected to rise to more than 40 percent by 2020.
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